Information Sharing, Advice Provision, or Delegation: What Leads to Higher Trust and Trustworthiness?
通过实验室实验比较信息共享、建议提供和委托三种协助过程对客户信任和供应商可信赖性的影响，发现即使经济激励不变，协助过程本身也会影响合作水平和绩效。
In many market settings, a customer often obtains assistance from a supplier (or service provider) to make better-informed decisions regarding the supplier’s product (or service). Because the two parties often have conflicting pecuniary incentives, customer trust and supplier trustworthiness play important roles in the success of these interactions. We investigate whether and how the process through which assistance is provided can foster trust and trustworthiness, and thus facilitate better cooperation. We compare three prevalent assistance processes: information sharing, advice provision, and delegation. We propose that, even if the pecuniary incentives of both parties do not vary from one assistance process to another, the assistance process itself impacts the customer’s and supplier’s nonpecuniary motives that give rise to trust and trustworthiness. Consequently, the assistance process affects the level of cooperation and payoffs. We test our behavioral predictions through laboratory experiments based on a retail distribution setting. We quantify the impact of different assistance processes on trust, trustworthiness and channel performance, and identify the underlying drivers of those impacts. Our results offer insight into the role of the assistance process in managing supplier assistance effectively and why certain assistance processes may lead to more successful outcomes than others even if the pecuniary incentives remain unaltered. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2617 . This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management.