MEASURING TRUST IN BUYER-SELLER RELATIONSHIPS

In recent years technological organizations, often characterized by a high supply risk in their supply chain, have an increased motivation to build long term relationships with their suppliers. The performance of suppliers is regarded as an indicator for the trust level in business relationships. However in current supplier evaluation methods, performance is never linked to inter-organizational trust. A fuzzy model, suitable for quantitative analysis of the performance of a supplier and how this reflects the trust level, was designed and evaluated by five procurement experts from technological organizations. A sensitivity analysis of the model and feedback from the business environment suggest that evaluation of a supplier in terms of trust is suitable for predicting the behavior of a supplier in a long term relationship. The proposed fuzzy model is expert-driven and in future research focus on the design of a data-driven (neuro-)fuzzy model may lead to further improvements