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This study aims to examine how various components of interpersonal trust (affective and cognitive) influence the duration of buyer-seller relationships in the emerging market (EM) context of a heterogeneous market structure dominated by small, fragmented sellers/suppliers.

The study proposes a hazard model for analyzing duration effects of interpersonal trust in the EM context. The model was validated using data on buying agents provided by 340 cocoa sellers/producers in Ghana, gathered from extensive field interviews.

Results of the survival analysis reveal a limited but significant positive duration effect of cognitive (ability) trust only. Further analysis of sellers’ duration intentions (intention to remain with a buyer) also reveals a positive impact of affective trust but no impact of cognitive (ability and integrity) trust. Cocoa bean sellers’ evaluation of buying firms’ purchasing agents suggests that buying firms underperform on emotional/affective components of interpersonal trust, and that private firms outperform state buying agents on ability trust as well.

While this study focused on the fragmented nature of sellers in the EM context, and the scope was limited to the sellers’ interpersonal trust perception of the buyer-seller, future research should examine both buyer and seller perceptions to obtain complete insight into the buyer-seller dyad in the EM context. In addition, the results of the duration effects identified in this study may not be generalizable to other EM export commodities, where channels have long been fully privatized. Ghana’s cocoa export marketing system was only recently privatized, and potentially has more sellers at the risk of adopting/switching relationships with their buyers than would be expected in more privatized expert commodity marketing systems.

Managers of export commodity buying firms in EMs can take advantage of the positive duration effects of cognitive trust by constantly improving the capabilities of their purchasing agents throughout the lifetime of their suppliers to sustain their relationship. However, sellers’ intention to switch can be mitigated by formalizing policies that encourage emotional bonds with sellers, especially small-scale producers in highly vulnerable bargaining positions. The aggregate output of small-scale producers could be of strategic importance in the future.

Managers need systematic empirical evidence of the nature of duration effects of interpersonal trust given anecdotal evidence suggesting that managers have a tendency to emphasize cognitive trust over affective/emotional trust. Further, the applicability of such evidence in the EM context is critical given unique conditions such as highly fragmented sellers dealing with relatively large corporations.

This paper aims to examine the effect of different relational bonding strategies on franchisees’ perceptions of benefits. The duration of the relationship is framed as a moderator between three types of relational bonds and the perceived benefits.

The data are collected via a survey from foodservice franchisees in South Korea. To test the study’s hypotheses, the research model was estimated with two-stage least squares.

The result shows that social and structural bonds have a significant impact on franchisees’ perceptions of benefits. There are some significant interactions between different types of relational bonds and the duration of the relationship. Perceptions of benefits are found to influence satisfaction, intentions to recommend, intentions to renew the contract and long-term orientation.

The study suggests that franchisors may want to focus on developing and strengthening social bonds, and also customize their relational approaches based on the duration of the relationship with the franchisees.

This research illustrates the impact of three types of relational bonding strategies on franchisees’ perceptions of the benefits and also examines the significant moderating role of the duration of the relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to study whether, of China's food and agriculture (agri-food) export, the trade relationships along the extensive margin can transform into short-term ones, and further convert into long-term ones along the intensive margin with survival and maintenance, especially, under what kind of conditions these transformation realize successfully, and what the factors are and how they impact on the length of the trade relationships duration.

The paper comprises three stages: decomposing China's agricultural export data (1999-2008) into highly disaggregated three distinct parts; with the Kaplan-Meier (KM) nonparametric estimation, discovering the practical source of stable and long-term export growth, and the threshold at which the short-run trade relationships deriving from newly established ones convert into long-run ones successfully; by semi parametric estimation through Cox proportional hazard model, preliminarily examining the possible impact of different factors on the trade relationship's hazard rate and duration.

The paper reveals that China agri-food trade pattern at the product level is surprisingly dynamic with newly established trade relations being more likely to fail. While the frequent volatilities of short-term relations at the extensive margin could be used to evaluate the source of short-term export growth especially and effectively, the pattern of negative dependence together with the threshold effect of duration indicates, only when these short-term relations live longer than four years will they substantially contribute to a stable and prolonged export growth. Simultaneously, trade duration significantly correlates to importing country's development status, region it belongs to, product processing degree, export experience and geographical space between trading partners.

To avoid the likelihood of misleading when estimating quantitatively the source of long-term export growth, researchers should be cautious in accurately evaluating the impacts of all possible factors on the two trade margins' performances, which is beyond the scope of this paper though, and a matter of ongoing work on the research agenda.

The study presents a set of important policy implications. Now that turnovers along the extensive margin have little impact on long-term China agri-food export growth, it turns out that improving export survival would result in significantly higher and stable export growth.

By distinguishing the survival of trade relationship channels from their deepening, the discoveries in the paper are crucial to understand the different role the intensive and extensive margins play in China agri-food export growth. The diversified hazard rates of export relations in different duration intervals suggest that the constant hazard rate assumption in Melitz and Bernard et al. is in some sense not appropriate.

The study aims to examine the indirect relationships via application (app) brand self-relevance emotions and self-relevance that underlie the relationships between perceived value of mobile apps and (brand) love with respect to mobile apps. The study further investigates the moderating role of user–app relationship duration in the formation process of brand love for mobile apps from a dynamic and long-term perspective.

A multiple moderated-mediation model is developed and empirically tested with a sample of 396 users of popular Chinese mobile educational apps.

The study reveals that utilitarian value exhibits positive indirect relationships with brand love for mobile apps through increased positive self-relevance emotions. All three types of perceived value of mobile apps (utilitarian, hedonic and social) affect app brand love positively via self-relevance. These three types of perceived value were found to be serially linked to brand love through self-relevance and self-relevance emotions. Furthermore, empirical evidence is found for the moderating effects of user–app relationship duration.

By testing mechanisms simultaneously in an integrative model, this study investigates the reasons for app brand love that attract a user into a lasting relationship with an app and extends knowledge of the app brand love building process in inducing strong and positive brand–self connections. Our study also makes practical contributions by offering insights into delivering the most desired benefits to mobile app users according to different contextual conditions, in order to attract and retain users in a more cost-effective manner.

The purpose of this paper is to determine how three relational attributes – duration, context and trust – are subjectively perceived by bank customers, and how these affect their saving behavior, as defined by monthly flows to mutual funds and the financial products bought and held in stock.

The authors use a combination of unique bank register and subjective survey data, and a structural equation model for theory development. Four constructs are developed to estimate the structural model, i.e. saving behavior, duration, context and trust.

The authors find that all three relational attributes have positive effects on saving behavior. The authors also find that duration and context have the largest total effects, and that trust is a mediating variable channeling indirect effects from context and duration to saving behavior.

One implication for bank managers is that it takes time and understanding of customer context to gain customer trust, but that this increases customer savings. Another implication is that the authors confirm that relational attributes can be studied using subjective measures in surveys, and that these have an effect on objective savings behavior. The findings provide an understanding that could develop both the customer’s value and the banks’ business opportunities.

The impact of relationships between bank advisors and their customers in terms of costs and benefits has been studied, but a little research has focused on the attributes of the relationship and how these affect customers’ saving behavior. The study also uses unique objective bank register data, combined with customers’ subjective perceptions of the relationship.

This paper aims to investigate the dynamic nature of consumer–brand relationships and, in particular, the passionate dimension of brand love. It explores the relevance of the two dimensions of the identification construct (inner and social self) for the creation of passionate love for a brand. More precisely, it attends to the possible mediating character of identification between the perceived utilitarian or hedonic value and passionate brand love. These effects are analysed in consideration of the moderating effect of relationship duration taking a further-reaching perspective and contributing to the understanding of the transformation of the brand love construct within a long-term consumer–brand relationship.

A survey on universally known brands representing both a hedonic and a utilitarian concept was conducted. The model has been tested using the partial least squares approach to structural equation modelling.

The effects of the antecedents of passionate brand love in general vary with increasing relationship duration. Inner self has a stronger effect on passionate brand love than social self and becomes even more important as the relationship matures. Hedonic and utilitarian value both show substantial direct and indirect effects, but the importance of utilitarian aspects grows with time, substantiating the rational nature of brand love within a long-term consumer–brand relationship.

As we assessed the perceived duration of an intimate relationship, longitudinal analysis should provide even more profound results.

Inasmuch as emotional attributes drive passionate feelings for a brand, the core utilitarian assets of a brand also evoke passionate love and should be highlighted, especially in long-term relationships with customers.

This paper investigates the interdependent effects of identification and customer perceived value (hedonic and utilitarian value) as antecedents of passionate brand love. This paper adapts a dynamic perspective on consumer–brand relationships by taking into account the moderating effect of perceived relationship duration.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the causal mechanisms that explain the relationship between the long-term buyer–supplier relationship and buyer performance. Building on the growing body of research on social capital in supply chain management (SCM), the authors examine how a buyer achieves superior performance in forming the enduring partnership with a supplier through two different forms of supplier embeddedness: buyer–supplier dyadic embeddedness and supplier external embeddedness.

The bootstrapping method is utilized in data analysis to examine the mediating effects of the two different forms of supplier embeddedness simultaneously on the linkage between the duration of buyer–supplier relationships and buyer performance outcomes.

The authors find that the two forms of supplier embeddedness serve as distinct conduits for the buyer to translate the long-term buyer–supplier relationship into performance effectiveness. Notably, dyadic embeddedness only mediates the linkage between the duration of buyer–supplier relationships and buyer economic performance, while supplier external embeddedness solely mediates the linkage between the duration of buyer–supplier relationships and buyer innovation performance.

This study empirically demonstrates that different forms of supplier embeddedness may benefit a buyer differentially when directed at distinct performance goals. If a buyer can leverage both buyer–supplier dyadic embeddedness and supplier external embeddedness, the buyer will overcome value creation limitations of social capital from a single source, obtaining more comprehensive performance benefits sought by developing long-term buyer–supplier relationships.

This paper examines the influence of relationship lending on the financial performance of Savings and Credit Co-operative Societies (SACCOS) in Tanzania.

A panel data of 460 observations representing 115 SACCOS from Tanzania was used. Descriptive statistics and panel regression models were employed to analyse the data.

The results show that the duration of the relationship is negatively and significantly related to SACCOS financial performance, substantiating the relationship lending theories. The number of relationships has an insignificant effect on financial performance.

The study focused on the duration and the number of relationships as aspects of relationship lending. The paper is limited in the sense that other aspects of relationship lending such as the concentration of relationships that could affect financial performance are not included in this study. The results apply to SACCOS and not to other microfinance institutions with strong bargaining power.

This study positions relationship lending in the SACCOS context where the market for the wholesale loan is less competitive.

Although value co-creation has been widely analyzed in digital contexts and various types of services (tourism, healthcare, etc.), it has received less study in the area of retail distribution. This study proposes that trust in the retailer and perceived support can encourage co-creation behavior on various levels: a basic level related to communication of service errors and a moderate-high level related to participation in service innovation. This study also proposes modeling for two different segments according to the participation in a loyalty program and according to the relationship duration.

A survey (N = 644) was used to test the model in the context of the consumer goods retail industry. Confirmatory factor analysis and multigroup structural equation modeling techniques were used to assess the proposed model.

The results show differences in the formation of co-creation behaviors depending on the customers analyzed. To encourage communication of service errors, customers affiliated to the program and customers with the longest customer-firm relationships must trust the distributor. Perceived support is crucial in encouraging feedback on service errors among non-affiliated and new customers. For promoting service innovation, the most significant antecedent is perceived support, followed by trust, independently of whether or not the customer belongs to the loyalty program. Customers with the longest relationship participate in co-innovation motivated equally by trust and perceived support. Customers with shorter relationship duration only participate in co-innovation if they perceived support.

This study contributes to deepening knowledge of co-creation behavior in the field of retail distribution. To date, research in this context has not considered the existence of various levels of co-creation: the basic level related to feedback on service errors and the moderate/high level related to participation in service co-innovation. Nor have studies tested the influence of trust and perceived support on these co-creation behaviors. Further, this study is the first study to integrate two significant variables that moderate retailers' strategy in the same model: membership in a loyalty program and duration of customer-firm relationship.

This study aims to investigate the effect of commitment and trust on satisfaction and sequential effect of satisfaction on relational outcomes (i.e. performance and governance cost) in a manufacturer–supplier relationship. Authors of this paper explore the relationship quality parameters such as trust, commitment and satisfaction and its effect on improving the performance and reducing the governance cost between the partners, as well as the effect of relationship duration on the antecedents and relational outcomes.

Based on the conceptual framework developed by authors, hypotheses were formulated, to test the effect of trust and commitment to performance and governance cost through the mediating effect of satisfaction in the manufacturer–supplier relationship. Data were collected from 196 manufacturers from the western part of India, through a structured questionnaire, and collected quantitative data were analyzed through structural equation modeling.

The analysis of the sample of 196 manufacturers suggests a positive relationship between satisfaction and commitment and between satisfaction and trust. The study suggests that increased satisfaction lowers governance cost as well as suggests a positive relationship between satisfaction and performance in a manufacturer–supplier relationship. As a relationship grows in an early stage, relationship performance improves, and as the relationship matures, the relationship performance diminishes.

Findings suggest that managers in business and industrial markets shall focus on commitment in the relationship rather than just trust that leads to satisfaction. It also suggests that a higher level of satisfaction enhances the performance and reduces the governance cost in a manufacturer–supplier relationship.

This research makes four contributions: first, it enquires the direct impact of trust and commitment to a manufacturer’s satisfaction; second, it investigates the indirect impact of trust on a manufacturer’s satisfaction through commitment in the relationship; third, it investigates the mediating satisfaction between trust-commitment and relationship outcomes (relationship performance and governance cost); fourth, the research shows the impact of relationship duration regarding the relational outcomes and the dimensions of relationship quality into a short-term and long-term relationship. It also uniquely suggests that the presence of commitment has a catalytic effect on satisfaction. Research offers managerial implication to increase the performance and to reduce the governance cost in the relationship.