While evidence suggests trust plays a fundamental role in maintaining successful buyer–seller relationships in Japan, little is known conceptually as to how foreign sellers can best develop trust in the minds of their Japanese customers. In this research, we develop and test a multi-component model of US seller actions that manifest key trust-building processes (intentionality- and capability-processes) which sellers find effective in building trust with their Japanese buyers. In this unique cultural context, theory suggests trust develops when sellers demonstrate benevolent intentions toward the buyer and exhibit a strong capability to fulfill business promises. An analysis of 181 US sellers in Japan demonstrates that a combination of trust-building efforts is recognized as being critical in seller attempts to develop and sustain trust on the part of their Japanese customers. Importantly, cultural sensitivity mediates the impact of intentionality-based practices on buyer trust, while capability-based activities directly influence trust.

Trust is a central construct in relationship marketing. Yet the literature provides mixed empirical evidence on the trust-performance linkage. Also, there is limited research on how to build trusting international buyer-seller relations. We develop a comprehensive model integrating performance-enhancing mechanisms and antecedent processes of trust in import-export relationships. Our survey results from importers trading with overseas manufacturers suggest that existing levels of trust have a positive effect on relationship performance outcomes achieved 1 year later. Importantly, trust takes on greater importance in enhancing performance under conditions of high interdependence, whereas in circumstances of low interdependence trust has no discernible effect. The findings also indicate that interfirm psychic distance, internal uncertainty, and exporter transaction-specific assets and opportunism are related to importer trust. Implications for academics and practitioners are addressed.

The purpose of this paper is to present how previous research has shown that, in negotiations that have integrative potential, men negotiate greater outcomes than do women. The primary purpose of this set of studies was to determine whether gender difference could be attributed to more effective performance in dividing value, more effective performance in creating value, or both. In study 1, participants negotiated a case situation that had integrative potential. Participants were randomly assigned to a side of the case and to a negotiation counterpart. This provided a comparison of all possible dyad gender combinations – female-female, female-male, and male-male. Statistical tests included actor-partner interdependence model (APIM) analysis, ANOVA, ?2, and t-tests. Study 2 replicated a sub-set of the study 1 tests using a different sample and a different negotiation case situation. Male-male dyads created more value than female-female dyads in both study 1 and study 2. No differences were found in the proportion of the negotiation “pie” claimed by men versus women. These combined results indicate that, in mixed-motive negotiations, gender differences in individual-level outcomes are a function of the amount of value created by the dyad, not in differences in the division of value. The paper extends research regarding gender and negotiation performance by pinpointing that, while men obtain greater outcomes than women in negotiations that have integrative potential, the difference in outcomes emanates from differences in creating value, not from differences in dividing value.

Humanitarian logistics plays a critical role in the aid response to hunger and disasters worldwide. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) uses a competitive bidding process to procure P.L. 480 Title II food aid, a $2 billion business annually. This paper describes a mixed-integer program (MIP) decision tool that mimics the USDA bid approach in order to improve ocean carrier and food supplier bid pricing strategy. First, the USDA bid process is detailed and the MIP decision tool is described. Then how the tool is run against historical data to approximate future USDA bid awards is explained, allowing the authors to subsequently advise food supplier and ocean carrier clients of expected price competition and pricing flexibility before they submit bids. The MIP decision tool has demonstrated its effectiveness in supporting $8 million in food aid bids. Bidding implications for food aid carriers and suppliers are provided as well as suggestions for additional opportunities for humanitarian logistics research are offered. Extant literature in procurement offers little practical support for bidder pricing preparation. Additionally, humanitarian logistics is an emerging, under-researched field, and this paper is the first to address sourcing and distribution of Title II food aid.

We analyze the impact of the press on the behavior of various economic agents by examining how media exposure of board ineffectiveness affects corporate governance, investor trading behavior, and security prices. Our focus on board quality is motivated by the strong media criticism to which corporate boards and corporate America, in general, have been recently subjected. The results indicate that media releases of (noisy) information have significant economic consequences. In particular, media exposure of board ineffectiveness forces the targeted agents to take corrective actions and enhances shareholder wealth. Individual investors appear to react negatively to the media exposure, whereas investment firms act as if they anticipate the targeted firms corrective actions.

An individual's reluctance to report bad news about a troubled information technology (IT) project has been suggested as an important contributor to project failure and has been linked to IT project escalation as well. To date, information systems researchers have drawn from the mum effect and whistle-blowing literature to gain a better understanding of the factors that influence bad news reporting. More recent theoretical work in the area of organizational silence offers a promising new conceptual lens, but remains empirically untested. In this research note, we integrate key elements of Morrison and Milliken's (2000) model of organizational silence, which has never been empirically tested, with the basic whistle-blowing model adapted from Dozier and Miceli (1985) . Using a role-playing experiment, we investigate how organizational structures/policies, managerial practices, and degree of demographic dissimilarity between employees and top managers create a climate of silence and how this climate, in turn, affects an individual's willingness to report. Our results show that all three types of factors contribute to a climate of silence, exerting both direct and indirect influence on willingness to report, as hypothesized. The implications of these findings and directions for future research are discussed.

An individual's reluctance to report the actual status of a troubled project has recently received research attention as an important contributor to project failure. While there are a variety of factors influencing the reluctance to report, prior information systems research has focused on only situational factors such as risk, information asymmetry, and time pressure involved in the given situation. In this paper, we examine the effects of both situational and personal factors on an individual's reporting behavior within the rubric of the basic whistle-blowing model adapted from Dozier and Miceli . Specifically, we identify perceived impact of information technology (IT) failure as a situational factor and personal morality and willingness to communicate as personal factors, and investigate their effects on the assessments and decisions that individuals make about reporting the IT project's status. Based on the results of a controlled laboratory experiment, we found that perceived impact of IT failure directly affects an individual's assessment of whether a troubled project's status ought to be reported, exerting an indirect influence on willingness to report bad news, and that personal morality directly affects all three steps in the basic whistle-blowing model, as hypothesized. Willingness to communicate, however, was found not to affect an individual's willingness to report bad news. The implications of these findings and directions for future research are discussed.

Privacy concerns and practices, especially those dealing with the acquisition and use of consumer personal information by corporations, are at the forefront of business and social issues associated with the information age. This research examines the privacy policies of large U.S. companies to assess the substance and quality of their stated information practices. Six factors are identified that indicate the extent to which a firm is dependent upon consumer personal information, and therefore more likely to develop high quality privacy statements. The study's findings provide practical and theoretical implications for information privacy issues, particularly for consumers who need to determine whether or not to disclose their personal identifying information to firms. The results illustrate the complexity involved in managing personal private information.

We develop the concept of virtual experiments and consider their application to environmental policy. A virtual experiment combines insights from virtual reality in computer science, naturalistic decision-making from psychology, and field experiments from economics. The environmental policy applications of interest to us are the valuation of wild fire management policies such as prescribed burn. The methodological objective of virtual experiments is to bridge the gap between the artefactual controls of laboratory experiments and the naturalistic domain of field experiments or direct field studies. This should provide tools for policy analysis that combine the inferential power of replicable experimental treatments with the natural “look and feel” of a field domain. We present data from an experiment comparing valuations elicited by virtual experiments to those elicited by instruments that have some of the characteristics of standard survey instruments, and conclude that responses in the former reflect beliefs that are closer to the truth.