## 2 Literature Review
### Negative Experiences and Attribution Theory  
Service quality and customer satisfaction are the two most important factors for service organizations. Service quality occurs during the service encounter, or \"moment of truth\", where the customer has an interaction with the service provider. If the customer encounters any incident during this moment, it may result in the customer leaving the situation dissatisfied [43]. [PERSON], et al. [44] demonstrated that intangible and tangible elements were the two most important factors that determined customers' perceptions of service quality. If the service expectations are not met, service failures occur. This, in turn, gives potential rise to complaints and/or negative experiences [45; 46; 47; 48]. The complaints themselves may also be regarded as negative experiences, even though they may be determined by factors outside the control of service providers. Therefore, whether or not the customers attribute the causes of the negative experience to the service provider will depend on their perception of the surrounding details [32]. Figure 1: Organizations involved in rating systems (Source: [PERSON] [38]). Attribution theory is a framework that explains the causal relationship between two incidents, assuming that people tend to uncover and evaluate the causes of their (dis)satisfaction [49], p. 549). The word attribution refers to the perceived or inferred cause of the result. The common principle is that individuals interpret behaviors in terms of their causes and that these interpretations play an important role in determining the reactions to those behaviors [50], p. 458). The theory also focuses on the interactions that take place between the attributions one makes about one's own and others' performances (on the \"antecedents side\") and the effect they have on one's subsequent choices and actions (on the \"consequences side\") [51; 52]. The antecedent side includes certain information about the behavior or circumstances leading up to the complaint behavior. This information is applied by the subject to infer the cause of the outcome [50]. For a guest staying at a high-end hotel, for instance, one can assume \"high expectations\" would be part of the antecedents. In this situation, compliance would be regarded as \"inside\" the expectations due to the fact that the guest is spending more money and, perhaps, has past staying experiences to judge by. If another guest were to spend less, he or she might have lower expectations, and the cause for compliance would be \"outside\" the expectation. Meanwhile, the consequences side deals with one particular result of the complaint behavior [50]. In situations where compliance is considered to fall within expectations, the subject credits the responsible party with positive or negative attitudes and/or traits based on the outcome of the event. Based on the attribution-consequence relationship, this study attempts to explore factors that might result in a subject attributing a particular cause to an event and examine how one cause might lead to another cause due to that particular attribution. In general, attribution theory has been widely discussed in literature (e.g., [PERSON] [51; 52], [PERSON] [53], [PERSON] and [PERSON] [54], and [PERSON], et al. [51; 52; 53; 54; 55]); however, little research has been pursued to investigate the causes for guests' complaint levels, and even less work has been completed on psychological explanations [56; 57]. Therefore, this study utilizes attribution theory to explain how to understand guests' complaining behavior by investigating which variables may be critical in understanding these phenomena. Understanding the causes behind dissatisfying service encounters is essential for hotelers who hope to reduce dissonance levels among customers.