Consumers around the world often give voluntary sums of money, known as tips, to service providers in appreciation for their work. Although there are no reliable measures of global tipping, tips in the U.S. food and beverage industry alone are estimated to exceed $45 billion a year. Tips are more than small change, and their visibility and significance have grown with the advent of digital tipping. This shift has expanded both the number and types of services encouraging tips, as well as the size of the tips suggested.
Academic psychologists and other scholars have studied tipping for more than 50 years, yet much of this research remains locked away in academic journals inaccessible to the public. Join us for a special Keynote in which Professor Michael Lynn, a leading tipping researcher and author of “The Psychology of Tipping: Scientific Insights for Services Customers, Workers, and Managers,” shares what we know about the topic, including why people tip, who the best and worst tippers are, why some occupations are tipped and others are not, how norms vary across countries, and what factors influence tip size.
Professor Lynn’s expertise will benefit consumers navigating today’s complex and evolving expectations, tipped workers seeking to increase their incomes, managers aiming to improve employee morale and customer satisfaction, and academics interested in advancing our understanding of this fascinating behavior.
