Inter-Firm Trust Production: Theoretical Perspectives

Although inter-firm trust plays a crucial role in inter-firm relationships that involve uncertainty, limited research has devoted to make a full review on inter-firm trust. The objective of the study is to investigate the sources of inter-firm trust in order to give a basement for building inter-firm trust. Drawn from many disciplines such as relationship marketing, social exchange theory, management, etc., this study has built the conceptual model to facilitate trust between partners in inter-firm relationships intentionally. The paper contributes to the knowledge of inter-firm relationships based on viewing trust from many perspectives. The paper also proposes some hypotheses related to inter-firm trust development which will be checked by future research.