"credence" appears in the following hypothesis in the article, and the article provides each with rationales:

H6: The positive effect of service separation on consumers’ benefit convenience is weaker for credence services than for experience services.
the article argues that the rationale is "Compared with experience services, credence services tend to be more
difficult to assess. If the hurdle is raised by having the credence
service delivered separately, customers will need to spend even more
time and effort to search for infomration on the service "

H7: The positive effect of service separation on consumers’ performance
risk is stronger for credence services than for experience services.
H8: The positive effect of service separation on consumers’
psychological risk is stronger for credence services than for
experience services.
rationale: "customers' intrinsic uncertainty about credence services will exacerbate the perceived risk caused by separation because their absence from service production will not only mean sensing fewer tangible cues and perceiving less control but also reduce their confidence in perceptions and evaluations of the service."

H11- Customers are more likely to purchase the separated mode of experience services than the separated mode of credence services
rationale: the latter has higher risks


But I think the most important factor to make the empirical data fit the hypothesis is not because the "unassessable nature" of credence. To me, the lower benefit convenience/purchase, higher risk of the separated credence service is that: in the article, the credence services used(i.e. Training Program & Student Counseling) is essentially more efficient in face-to-face interation, not because seperated service is not easy to assess......

What do you think?

For my consideration, the authors did not argue that “the most important factor to make the empirical data fit the hypothesis is because the unassessable nature of credence.”

Here is the description of credence services from this article:”for credence services, customers are not able to gather enough information from experience and therefore have difficulty making confident evaluations.”

Thus, the most important feature of credence services in this article might be “not able to gather enough information from experience” rather than “unassessable nature.” Therefore, the researchers make numerous research of credence services rather than just study about the unassessable nature of credence.

This is my consideration of this article. : )