Virtual enterprises mostly renounce formal contractual guarantees as a coordination mechanism in order to ensure overall flexibility. However, when formal coordination mechanisms vanish, informal coordination immediately gains increasing importance. As a consequence, trust becomes a decisive issue for all kinds of loosely coupled organizations and especially virtual enterprises. This paper presents some of the results of the three year interdisciplinary research project TiBiD that explored the issues of trust and reputation in the initiation phase of virtual enterprises. The project brought together researchers from three different disciplines - psychology, management research and informatics â to design, explore and evaluate a field experiment on the key question of how trust is built and how trust-building can be supported in the early phase of cooperation processes between distributed and loosely coupled organizational units.    «

Virtual enterprises mostly renounce formal contractual guarantees as a coordination mechanism in order to ensure overall flexibility. However, when formal coordination mechanisms vanish, informal coordination immediately gains increasing importance. As a consequence, trust becomes a decisive issue for all kinds of loosely coupled organizations and especially virtual enterprises. This paper presents some of the results of the three year interdisciplinary research project TiBiD that explored the i...    »