Abstract: The development of the Internet has promoted customer engagement behaviors (CEBs), and the concept of CEBs has gradually attracted the attention of academia. CEBs can be divided into positively-valenced CEBs and negatively-valenced CEBs. A large number of existing literatures show that positively-valenced CEBs have positive effects on companies, but few studies focus on the negative effects of positively-valenced CEBs. Based on moral licensing, the authors study the relationship between positively-valanced CEBs and customer irrational behaviors, and propose a moderated mediation model to explore the mediating role of psychological entitlement and the moderating role of psychological distance. The authors use survey and experiments to test the model empirically. The results show that: (1) positively-valenced CEBs will trigger customer irrational behaviors; (2) customer psychological entitlement has a mediating effect on positively-valenced CEBs and customer’s irrational behavior. (3) customers’ perceived psychological distance has a moderating effect on the mediating effect of customers’ psychological entitlement, that is, the closer the customer’s perceived psychological distance, the stronger the mediating effect of customer’s psychological entitlement.

Key words: customer engagement behavior, customer irrational behavior, moral licensing, psychological entitlement, psychological distance