Coproduction in the Assessment of a Smart Mobility Service

Local governments around the globe are facing global issues, including financial retrenchment, declining trust of the public, increasing demand for a stronger focus on citizens' needs, and enhanced public service provision. Coproduction, which comprises the collaboration between public service providers and users in the design, delivery and assessment of public services, is presented as an attractive strategy to overcome these challenges. The central idea hereby is that the coordination of expertise, knowledge, resources, technology and processes leads to better results than working independently.

Smart cities, therefore, have a special interest in coproduction as the "smartness" of a city is strongly related to the potential of attracting and mobilizing actors via ICT-enabled collaboration. The special interest of coproduction in smart cities mainly lies in the relevance of engaging users to realize user-centric smart services. By introducing and implementing ICTs, smart cities can offer new opportunities to engage public service users in smart public service provision through coproduction. Nevertheless, for most smart cities, the challenge remains to achieve the switch from users' passive roles to active engagement.

Given the promised potential behind coproduction, it has been treated as a panacea in much of the academic literature and received prolific attention. Yet, gaps in our understanding of digital coproduction, particularly in the co-assessment of smart public services, remain. Co-assessment is the type of coproduction in the assessment phase of the public service cycle that refers to the collaboration with users in the evaluation and monitoring of public services. Building on these observations, this dissertation questions if the assumptions of traditional coproduction theory also apply to understand users' engagement in smart public service co-assessment. Therefore, this dissertation asks under which conditions users engage in the co-assessment of smart public services, focusing on public values priorities and users' individual-level factors.

To address the overall research question, this dissertation adopts a mixed-method approach. While the first chapter corresponds to a narrative literature review (Chapter 2), the rest of the chapters build on a case study design, including a qualitative study (Chapter 3) and two quantitative studies (Chapters 4 and 5). The qualitative study builds on semi-structured interviews and key documents examined through a thematic analysis. The quantitative studies build on the integration of survey data and SmartBike's log data of more than 9,000 user-reporters and non-reporters (i.e., users' actual reporting behavior).

Each empirical chapter of this dissertation aimed to examine conditions of user engagement in order to address the overall research question. An overarching introduction presents these chapters (Chapter 1), and the findings are discussed in an overarching conclusion and discussion (Chapter 6). Chapter 2 reviewed key literature on coproduction, public values, and smart cities. On the basis of the literature review, relevant factors, challenges, and advantages of ICT-enabled coproduction of smart public services were identified. As such, this chapter contributed with relevant insights to discuss the findings of the following chapters concerning conditions at play when engaging users to coproduce. Chapter 3 focused on the increasing involvement of private actors as providers of smart public services. The study found that the priorities of private actors might conflict with those of public actors, and in turn, they might influence both the provision and coproduction of the services. Moreover, this might have implications for the potential engagement of users as coproducers.

The following Chapters 4 and 5 examined the association between users' individual-level factors and users' reporting behavior. Chapter 4 studied the extent to which users' personal characteristics and experiences play a role in users' channel choice to engage in reporting service-related issues. The results showed that users' socio-demographics, internet use, channel satisfaction, and experience with the service are related to users' channel choice. Next, Chapter 5 examined the extent to which users' motivations are associated with their actual reporting behavior and explored if users' motivations are also associated with the effort intensity of such behavior in public service co-assessment. This study found that users' reporting behavior and the effort intensity of such behavior are associated with users' self-centered motivations, yet no associations were found with community-centered motivations. These findings challenge the traditional assumptions of coproduction theory. Nevertheless, when examining users' digital reporting, the study found that users are both self- and community-centered motivated.

This dissertation concludes that both individual-level factors and the service providers' public values priorities are significant conditions for understanding user engagement in smart mobility co-assessment. Moreover, this dissertation contributed to the academic literature by examining a number of factors related to users' engagement in the co-assessment of a smart mobility service and providing a comprehensive study of user reporting behavior. Finally, by bringing together different strands of literature and theoretical perspectives, this dissertation has advanced the knowledge base of coproduction research and contributes to examining if general insights of coproduction research also apply to a specific type of coproduction, in this case to co-assessment.