A review of the term trust" in the buyer-seller relationships"

Abstract

This study aims to introduce a review of the history of "trust in the buyer-seller relationships" as a relational behavior norm in marketing and also management literature. The term, trust, became more popular in the 90s in the marketing literature. In the 90s and 2000s the trust level was measured between firms in the ongoing business relationships, so this term was defined as a two-sided benevolence, that helps managing the relations. There are several definitions in the literature on trust. Morgan and Hunt (1994) defined trust as a parties' confidence in an exchange partner's reliability and integrity; Ganesan (1994) added also benevolence and credibility to the definition of trust as components, focus on the motives and intentions of the exchange partner. According to Moorman et al. (1992) trust is the willingness to rely on an exchange partner in whom one has confidence. All dimensions suggest that trust is a positive behavior, prepare a continuing and long-term buyer-seller relationship. This review aims to sum up these kind of definitions and studies to see the overall findings about trust with a literature summary table. The table includes shortly the definitions, the authors, the study dates and the findings about the term trust. The study's limitation is that the only behavior (norm) of the channel (buyer-seller) relationships was chosen. while there are other norms that affect the business relationships such as satisfaction, conflict. information exchange, flexibility, etc. Another limitation is that we limited defining trust in only buyer-seller relationships literature in 90s and 2000s, beside there are many definitions about trust in management literature. Many of the questions to measure the level of trust were also developed and examined by the researchers, who dealt with the channel behaviors. The paper involves the most widely-accepted scale questions lists in addition to the literature summary table, as well.