TiBiD - Trust Building And Matchmaking Support For Virtual Enterprises

Virtual enterprises mostly renounce formal contractual guarantees as 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 virtual enterprises in special. 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 – to design, explore and evaluate a field experiment on the key question how trust is build and how trust-building can be supported in the early phase of cooperation processes between distributed and only loosely coupled organizational units.