Other Business Commons^™

Fiduciary Law And The Preservation Of Trust In Business Relationships, Brian J. Broughman, Elizabeth Pollman, D. Gordon Smith

All Faculty Scholarship

This chapter explores the role of mandatory fiduciary obligations in preserving trust between business parties. Because contracts are inevitably incomplete, after investment there is always a risk of opportunism. While the parties could try to draft a more detailed agreement prohibiting various forms of opportunism, the very act of haggling over such protections may signal distrust, eliciting costly reactions (defensive measures/hedging/lack of intrinsic motivation) in the counterparty. In the absence of fiduciary protections, a vulnerable party may decide to forgo important protections against opportunism, not because such protections are suboptimal or hard to specify ex ante but because bargaining for …

Unrequited: Asymmetry In Interorganizational Trust, Melissa E. Graebner, Fabrice Lumineau, Darcy Fudge Kamal

Business Faculty Articles and Research

Many studies of interorganizational relationships assume that trust between organizations is symmetric. In this essay, we explore the origins of this assumption and examine relevant quantitative and qualitative evidence from the literatures on strategy, marketing, supply chain management, and information systems. We conclude that no systematic evidence currently exists to support the assumption that interorganizational trust is typically symmetric. We explore how the possibility of asymmetry complicates interpretation of previous research on the effects of interorganizational trust. We encourage further research to identify conditions under which symmetry is likely, and offer a variety of strategies that scholars may use to …

Unrequited: Asymmetry In Interorganizational Trust, Melissa E. Graebner, Fabrice Lumineau, Darcy Fudge Kamal

Business Faculty Articles and Research

Many studies of interorganizational relationships assume that trust between organizations is symmetric. In this essay, we explore the origins of this assumption and examine relevant quantitative and qualitative evidence from the literatures on strategy, marketing, supply chain management, and information systems. We conclude that no systematic evidence currently exists to support the assumption that interorganizational trust is typically symmetric. We explore how the possibility of asymmetry complicates interpretation of previous research on the effects of interorganizational trust. We encourage further research to identify conditions under which symmetry is likely, and offer a variety of strategies that scholars may use to …

Mutual And Exclusive: Dyadic Sources Of Trust In Interorganizational Exchange, Bill Mcevily, Akbar Zaheer, Darcy Fudge Kamal

Business Faculty Articles and Research

Trust in interfirm exchange has traditionally been treated as mutually held and jointly determined by the two parties in a relationship. Yet, the expectations of exchange partners can, and routinely do, differ with respect to the goals, preferences, and vulnerabilities in their shared relationship. To account for such differences in expectations, we propose a broadened conceptualization of the sources of interorganizational trust as dyadic. Viewing the sources of trust as dyadic expands the conventional focus on mutual elements to further emphasize exclusive features of an exchange relationship. To substantiate our theory, we examine a key source of interorganizational trust, exchange …

Fairness-Trust-Loyalty Relationship Under Varying Conditions Of Supplier-Buyer Interdependence, Thani Jambulingam, Ravi Kathuria, John R. Nevin

Business Faculty Articles and Research

Relationship marketing plays a significant role in supply chain practice and academic studies. Using the resource advantage theory within the relationship marketing framework, we studied the mediating role of trust as a governance mechanism in the fairness-loyalty relationship under different types of interdependence structure between suppliers (wholesalers) and buyers (retailers). Our findings, based on data from retail pharmacies, demonstrate that only under conditions of symmetric independence, trust, as a governance mechanism, completely mediate the relationship between fairness and loyalty. Under conditions of both perceived independence (i.e., lack of interdependence) and asymmetric buyer dependence, however, trust does not mediate but fairness …

What Color Is Your Paratext?, Geoffrey Bilder, Andrée J. Rathemacher

Technical Services Department Faculty Publications

In the final vision session of the 2009 NASIG Annual Conference, Geoffrey Bilder from CrossRef discussed the problem of how to identify trustworthy scholarly information on the Internet. This problem is exacerbated by readers’ growing distrust of intermediaries such as publishers and librarians, by the fact that the Internet lacks the traditions that have developed in scholarly communication to ensure trust, and by the sheer amount of information now readily available. Paratext is understood as anything outside of a text that sets expectations about that text. In the past, paratext, for example a publisher logo, provided important clues as to …

How Fairness Garners Loyalty In The Pharmaceutical Supply Chain: Role Of Trust In The Wholesaler-Pharmacy Relationship, Thani Jambulingam, Ravi Kathuria, John R. Nevin

Business Faculty Articles and Research

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to understand how fairness garners loyalty by breeding trust in the pharmaceutical wholesaler‐pharmacy relationship. Specifically, the paper seeks to understand if the two dimensions of fairness – procedural and distributive – contribute differently in fostering the two types of trust – credibility and benevolence. The paper further aims to examine how the two dimensions of trust mediate the fairness‐loyalty relationship.

Design/methodology/approach

– Data from 156 retail pharmacies on their relationship with the pharmaceutical wholesalers are used to test the hypotheses. The mediation models are tested using the Barron and Kenny procedure.

Findings …