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This paper aims to explore the efficiency of various customer trust repair efforts for high-risk products that are closely related with the safety and health of customers after negative publicity. Many corporations are suffering from the crisis of customer trust after negative publicity in China in recent years.

Taking the Chinese dairy industry as the research context, this research adopted quantitative survey methodology using self-administered questionnaires to collect data of 204 dairy consumers in mainland China. Hypotheses tests were conducted using structural equation modeling.

The results reveal that, for the high-risk products, affective repair has positive effect on benevolence-based trust and integrity-based trust, and informational repair has strong positive relationship with competence-based trust and integrity-based trust. Surprisingly, there are no significant relationship between functional repair and three factors of trust. In addition, all three trust factors positively affect repurchase intention.

This paper is among the first to examine and confirm the efficiency of various customer trust repair efforts for high-risk products after negative publicity. The findings of this paper provide the high-risk product companies with guidance about how to repair customer trust after negative publicity.

As an emerging technology, medical artificial intelligence (AI) plays an important role in the healthcare system. However, the service failure of medical AI causes severe violations to user trust. Different from other services that do not involve vital health, customers' trust toward the service of medical AI are difficult to repair after service failure. This study explores the links among different types of attributions (external and internal), service recovery strategies (firm, customer, and co-creation), and service recovery outcomes (trust).

Empirical analysis was carried out using data (N = 338) collected from a 2 × 3 scenario-based experiment. The scenario-based experiment has three stages: service delivery, service failure, and service recovery. The attribution of service failure was divided into two parts (customer vs. firm), while the recovery of service failure was divided into three parts (customer vs. firm vs. co-creation), making the design full factorial.

The results show that (1) internal attribution of the service failure can easily repair both affective-based trust (AFTR) and cognitive-based trust (CGTR), (2) co-creation recovery has a greater positive effect on AFTR while firm recovery is more effective on cognitive-based trust, (3) a series of interesting conclusions are found in the interaction between customers' attribution and service recovery strategy.

The authors' findings are of great significance to the strategy of service recovery after service failure in the medical AI system. According to the attribution type of service failure, medical organizations can choose a strategy to more accurately improve service recovery effect.

The purpose of this study is to understand how managers in entrepreneurial small businesses (ESBs) deal with exogenous (macro) crises, particularly in relation to the breakdown of intra- and inter-stakeholder trust.

Utilising a qualitative approach, we draw lessons from Greek ESBs greatly affected by the 2008–2019 economic and 2020–2022 health crises. Based on 54 in-depth, longitudinal investigations of four ESBs at three time points, this research offers insights on overcoming organisation-stakeholder trust breakdowns that emerg due to crises.

The findings suggest that macro-level crises undermined the foundations of trust-based relationships, creating a trust gap between organisations and their stakeholders and threatening ESBs’ business practices. Our framework suggests that ESBs repair trust relationships, both intra- and inter-organisational, through sense-making of trust breakdown, implementing trust-repair strategies, and then maintaining trust in those stakeholder relationships through challenging crisis periods.

Practitioners can use the suggested framework in relation to overcoming intra- and inter-stakeholder trust breakdowns during macro-level crises.

The paper offers a new framework that can aid entrepreneurs and managers in making sense of repairing and maintaining trust in stakeholder relationships during turbulent times.

Given the fierce competition in financial services, service failure management and trust restoration tactics are becoming strategic priorities. Studies investigating trust restoration have increased over the years due to the significance of trust in services and the frequency of trust violations. Drawing on the sense-making and defensive approaches of attribution theory, this study aims to explore the effectiveness of various trust recovery tactics (e.g. apology, explanation, and investigation) in financial services considering the prevalence of service failure severity.

Based on a scenario-based survey, this study gathered data from 402 consumers of different banks in Pakistan. The study analyzed the data using ordinary least square regressions and structural equation modeling.

The study indicated that explanation is more effective in repairing character-competence and commitment-based trust, while investigation remained highly effective for inducing congruence-based trust. Interestingly, an apology was more effective for communication-based trust repairing, while context-based trust recovery was unaffected against all recovery tactics. Despite the prevalence of severe service failure, recovery actions proved fully effective for character-competence and commitment-based trust while partially effective for congruence-based trust recovery. This study also found that severe service failure undermines the effectiveness of recovery actions in repairing communication and context-based trust.

The study extends the literature on trust recovery by integrating sense-making and defensive attribution theory. The sense-making approach contributes to the existing knowledge on trust recovery by elucidating how consumers and service providers develop a shared understanding to facilitate the recovery mechanism of multidimensional trust in financial services.

The aim of this paper is to study the critical role of trust in electronic commerce extensively in the context of establishing initial trust between trading partners. Ongoing trust between partners can quickly be eroded through security or other trust violations. This paper examines whether customers are willing to transact with an eCommerce vendor in light of security and trust violations.

The paper draws upon research in professional trust relationships and adapts it to the e-commerce context to create a process view of trust violation and repair. Using a design science framework, this paper employs agent-based modeling as the simulation technique to study the implications of security and trust violations on the willingness of customers to continue transacting with the vendor. The simulations are conducted for a variety of trust violations and reconciliation actions.

While some of the results are predictable, the key finding for managers is that moderate reconciliation tactics are effective for all cases but the most severe trust violations, where trust is irrevocably broken. This has clear financial implications, particularly in cases where vendors may operate with small margins in competitive markets.

Given the increasing push toward mobile and Internet-based commerce, and the large range of possible trust violations and security incidents in online purchases, coupled with increasing competition among vendors, it becomes imperative for vendors to provide effective tactics to repair customer trust violations when they arise.

This research examines the relationship between the timeliness in announcing the discovery of a data breach and consumer trust in an e-commerce company, as well as later trust-rebuilding efforts taken by the company to compensate users impacted by the breach.

A survey experiment was used to examine the effect of both trust-reducing events (announced data breaches) and trust-enhancing events (provision of identity theft protection and credit monitoring) on consumer trust. The timeliness of the breach announcement by an e-commerce company was manipulated between two randomly assigned groups of subjects; one group viewed an announcement of the breach immediately upon its discovery, and the other viewed an announcement made two months after the breach was discovered. Consumer trust was measured before the breach, after the breach was announced, and finally, after the announcement of data protection.

The results suggest that companies that delay a data breach announcement are likely to suffer a larger drop in consumer trust than those that immediately disclose the data breach. The results also suggest that trust can be repaired by providing data protection. However, even after providing identity theft protection and credit monitoring, companies that fail to promptly disclose a breach have lower repaired trust than companies that promptly disclose.

This study contributes to the literature on e-commerce trust by examining how a company's forthrightness in reporting a data breach impacts user trust at the time of the disclosure of the data breach and after subsequent efforts to repair trust.

This paper aims to understand consumers’ response to the trust repair mechanisms adopted by corporate brands in a service sector context following prominent trust damaging organizational transgressions.

Adopting a qualitative approach, six focus group discussions are used to investigate three high-profile consumer trust erosion cases within the service sector.

Consumer trust varies by context. Despite the severity of trust damage, corporate brands can recover trust towards their brands amongst consumers not directly affected by transgressions. Not all trust repair mechanisms are equally applicable to all service contexts, and re-branding could be used as a trust repair mechanism. Corporate brands in the service sector should focus on sense-making, relational approaches and transparency. Orchestration of trust repair mechanisms needs to be integrated within the trust rehabilitation processes.

This study illustrates it is important to reconsider trust repair processes to accommodate context and integrate post-transgression consumer research.

Successful corporate brand rehabilitation of consumer trust requires examination of the trustworthiness dimensions consumers express before and after the transgression to select the most appropriate trust repair mechanisms. Findings suggest organizations also have preventative trust repair management programs.

This research is the first to empirically apply the conceptual framework of Bachmann et al. (2015) to explore consumer responses to the trust repair mechanisms adopted by corporate brands by context.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the impact of causal attributions (locus, stability, and controllability attributes) on trust violations and the coping strategies (affective, functional, and informational initiatives) involved in trust repair on building positive moods within the context of e‐commerce.

The research model is tested using data collected from 513 active e‐shoppers. Structure equation modeling is employed to verify and validate the research model.

Results show that strategies for repairing trust are effective in building positive moods among consumers, while causes of negative events have a negative impact on consumer mood. Furthermore, positive moods significantly influence the rebuilding of consumer trust. This research demonstrates that positive mood is an important mediator in trust repair.

The research results provide insight into how e‐vendors can ease the tension associated with trust‐related disputes.

This study represents one of the few attempts to integrate the attribution theory with trust research and to outline the strategies of post‐encounter trust rebuilding process following a trust violation.

Over the last decade, trust repair has become an important theoretical and practical concern in HRM. The purpose of this paper is to explain why organisations fail to repair their stakeholders’ trust following a series of trust breaches.

Archival data is used to investigate the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). Using the analytical frame of the detective novel, the authors analyse reputational scandals in RBS, and in doing so, they explore the interweaving of two stories: the story of the “crime” (the bank's actions which led to breaches of trust) and the story of the “detectives” (parliamentary, regulatory and press investigators).

Based on their analysis, the authors argue that the organisation's failure to repair trust is associated with ineffective detection of what went wrong in the bank and why.

HR practitioners dealing with similar situations should understand the complicated and unfolding nature of repeated transgressions, and the reasons why previous trust repair efforts may have failed.

An organisation may be showing willingness to accept responsibility for the violation of trust, but while new transgressions happen, trust repair efforts may fail. Therefore, what is needed in organisations is a longitudinal analysis that takes into account organisational history, including earlier wrongdoings.

The paper is one of the few analysing trust repair from a process perspective and using the metaphor of the detective novel to provide insights into organizational reintegration.

A rash of security incidents in ride-sharing have made discovering the mechanisms to repair consumers' trust essential for the information technology (IT)-enabled ride-sharing platforms. The purpose of this paper is to explore how the two response strategies (i.e. security policies [SPs] and apologies) of platforms repair passengers' trust and whether the two implementation approaches of SPs (i.e. pull and push) lead to different results in repairing passengers' trust in the platforms.

A field survey based on a real scenario (n = 238) and an experiment (n = 245) were conducted to test the hypotheses empirically. Structural equation modeling and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) are employed in the data analyses.

This study finds that (1) both SPs and apologies aid in repairing trust; (2) repaired trust fully mediates the influence of SPs on continuance usage and partially mediates the influence of apologies on continuance usage; (3) security polices and the three dimensions of apologies play different roles in repairing trust and retaining passengers and (4) both pull-based and push-based SPs can repair the violated trust; however, the effect of the pull approach is greater than that of the push approach.

The findings provide guidelines for ride-sharing platforms in taking appropriate actions to repair users' trust after security incidents.

The findings reveal the mechanism of trust repairing in the fields of ride-sharing and extend the contents of the trust theory and pull–push theory.