Towards an Expectation-Oriented Model of Public Service Quality: A Preliminary Study of NYC 311

Abstract

The 311 system has been deployed in many U.S. cities to manage non-emergency civic issues such as noise and illegal parking. To assess the performance of 311-mediated public service provision, researchers developed models based on execution time and the status of execution. However, research on user satisfaction suggests that the level of individuals’ perception is asymmetric with respect to the quality of services, because negative experiences have a stronger impact on people’s dissatisfaction than positive experiences do for satisfaction. Informed by the uneven nature of human satisfaction regarding positive and negative service quality, we propose an expectation-based model that measures the quality of public services by adapting the asymmetric function that reflects different perceptions of positive and negative experiences. Our preliminary analysis using the NYC 311 and Census data provides an initial assessment of the model’s validity.