How Trust Pursuing Businesses Play in an Asymmetric Power Network?

This historical, longitudinal, and qualitative study draws upon a contingent view of trust to explain how asymmetric power causes trust structures to move from trust equilibrium to trust disequilibrium and triggers strategic trust-pursuing actions. We conclude that a trustor firm has the dominant and manipulating power in an asymmetric power network to extract maximal value in a systematic way, thereby causing trustee firms to adopt strategic trust-pursuing actions to buffer the trustor's power. Consequently, this study proposes an original theoretical framework to illustrate how trustee firms must be smart trust-pursuers in a trust-based network with asymmetric power.