Trust attitudes and behaviors among exchange partners

Trust and trustworthiness play a critical role in inter-organizational collaboration especially between supply chain partners. The question arises whether supply chain decisions that seem to indicate trust are actually related to trust attitudes in that setting. Furthermore, we ask the question, which target of trust attitudes matter? We explore these questions while studying business executives’ decisions in a dyadic supply chain exchange. We measure two targeted measures of trust attitudes. Network trust refers to trust attitudes toward potential partners in current exchanges, while preconditioned trust refers to trust attitudes toward outside business partners in prior experiences. To quantify trust behaviors, we observe the executives making decisions in a forecast information sharing experiment that simulates a fundamental and actively studied research topic in supply chain management. Executives with high preconditioned trust consciously base their trust behaviors on network trust (i.e., the perceiv...