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An important assumption in testing theoretical models is measurement invariance. However, little research in construction project management investigates the issue of measurement invariance. To bridge the gap, the current paper aims at: first, testing trust measurement invariance in project teams across gender; second, delineating various measurement invariance tests and demonstrating them with Amos; and last but not least, increasing researchers' awareness about measurement invariance issue in the construction project management field.

The measurement invariance of trust across gender is investigated using survey data collected from architects in project design teams of A-level architectural design institutes in China. Multisample confirmatory factor analysis is conducted with Amos to test configural invariance, metric invariance, scalar invariance, factor covariance and variance invariance, error variance invariance, latent mean invariance of the Chinese version of McAllister's two-dimension trust scale.

All the test results of the above invariances are supportive. Goodness-of-fit indexes such as CFI deserve more empirical studies to verify.

The results imply that the trust structure of male and female architects is equivalent. In other words, male and female architect data of trust research in construction project management could be aggregated.

It is recommended that test of measurement invariance should be conducted while new measurement scales are under construction.

Since all the invariance tests are rarely conducted within a single study, the current research is the first paper to investigate the measurement invariance issue in the construction industry.

In the literature on product branding, significant attention is given to brand equity in the consumer context, but relatively little attention is paid to the application of the concept in the business-to-business (B2B) context. Even less research exists on the role of brand equity in the retailing context. Retailers are often seen as irrelevant to the source of brand value, resulting in manufacturers not targeting retailers to help them build stronger brands. Potential occurs, therefore, for some channel conflict to exist between manufacturers and retailers. On the one hand, retailers tend to focus on building their own, private brands to differentiate themselves from other retail competitors and to increase their power in relation to manufacturer brands. At the same time, most retailers still need to create a good image in the consumer marketplace by selling famous, manufacturer-branded products. In other words, retailers often have to sell famous brands even if they would prefer to sell other brands including their own. Manufacturers tend to focus their brand-building efforts on the consumer market to entice consumers to insist that retailers stock their brands, rather than placing any real emphasis on building a strong and positive brand relationship with the retailer directly.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a context dependent, multi perspective multilevel trust measurement instrument to measure supply chain members' trust.

Since trust is a context dependent phenomenon and the level of trust between partners cannot be measured easily, a conceptual framework is developed to measure supply chain partners' trust from risk perspective (i.e. risk related to characteristics, rational and institutions/security) considering the relationship as “Risky”, “Risk‐worthy” and “Not risky” and translated them in terms of trust perspectives as “No trust”, “Trust worthy” and “Trust”.

Although the research on trust emphasizes to focus on a member's characteristics such as benevolence, integrity, ability, reliability, credibility, etc, decision to trust require multiple judgments therefore trust should be measured from various context dependent perspectives at multiple levels in relationship from trustor's perceptions and calculations. The key perspectives of trust in supply chain relationship are; characteristics trust, rational trust (cost and benefit, dynamic capabilities, technology) and institutional trust/security system. An important argument of this concept is that trust can only be dyadic.

Researchers on trust have repeatedly confirmed that trust is a multifaceted and context dependent concept. However the business context may not remain the same in the dynamic business environment, therefore this conceptual framework can be used as generalized trust measurement tool.

This paper has attempted to develop a simple and practical multi level trust measurement tool for the complex multi‐dimensional construct of supply chain partners' relationship trust.

This study may be one of the first to develop a multi level trust measurement concept from risk perspectives.

The purpose of this paper is to seek to investigate public trust as an important factor of performance in the charitable sector, and explain the necessity of including public trust assessment in charity performance measurement.

Two focus group interviews were conducted in the UK to investigate the reasons for trust and lack of trust in charities, which contributed to the identification of the relation between public trust and charity performance measurement.

Indicators of public trust in charities are not only related to some conventional criteria for evaluating charity performance, but also shed light on “soft” factors which are relatively new criteria used to assess performance. Furthermore, measuring public trust is an indispensable supplement to existing approaches of performance assessment in the charitable sector. It remedies the drawbacks of previous studies by employing a “bottom-up” approach to evaluation that avoids the conflicting demands of different stakeholders when deciding assessment criteria.

Re-conducting the study with larger samples, combining with quantitative surveys, and applying more rigorous approach to data analysis could be helpful for improving the generalizability of the results.

The study highlights the necessity of considering public trust when measuring charity performance. Additionally, it suggests charities to make improvements of their performance based on the reasons for trust and lack of trust.

It provides insight into the public trust of charities and, for the first time, explores the applicability of measuring public trust in charity performance evaluation.

This paper aims to answer following three important but not well-answered or unanswered questions in the extant trust literatures: What is the true magnitude that trust impacts on performance? Is there any consistency among the effects of trust on performance at different levels? How does vertical distance affect the trust-performance relationship?

It captures the law between trust and performance at different levels by conducting a meta-analytic examination consisting of 238 independent empirical studies, 586 effect sizes and 110,576 independent samples.

It makes a periodic conclusion that trust significantly promotes performance. Specifically, trust not only has stronger positive correlation with team performance than individual and organizational performance inside organization, but also strongly facilitates organizational performance between organizations. Moreover, consistency exits in the effects of trust on performance at different levels. On one hand, trust has stronger positive correlation with performance of contextual type than performance of innovative type than performance of task type at different levels. On the other hand, promotion effect of trust on performance strengthens when the vertical distance between trustors and trustees diminishes. Additionally, three potential moderators including publication status, measurement tool and common method variance moderate the focused relation, but moderating effect is not thorough for regional culture. Moderating directions of the above four potential moderators are highly consistent.

This paper answers the three important but not well-answered or unanswered questions.

The purpose of this paper is first, to develop constructs to measure three important concepts in the supply chain literature: contracts, trust and market environment, in the Chinese context and to further investigate the relationships amongst these three concepts based on the formulated hypothesis.

The research methodology has strictly followed the recommended scale development procedures, which include specifying each constructs, item generation, data collection, reliability and validity test, and finally test hypothesis. The primary data were collected in October 2008 in Hubei Province, China. Both exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis are applied to assess the reliability and validity of the three constructs.

In total, 22 items were retained to measure six dimensions for the three core concepts: contract (marketing and production), trust (reliability and benevolence), and market environments (diversity and volatility). Second, the finding supported this argument that contracts and trust functions as complements. Furthermore, a positive relationship between environmental uncertainty and the use of contractual governance was found.

The measurement model for environmental volatility is less satisfied. More research should be carried out on the measurement of market environment in the future.

This paper identifies and validates key constructs underlying supply chain management research: contract, trust and market environment, in a Chinese context. These measurable concepts could be applied in similar settings to further investigate small‐scale farmer's position along the supply chain.

This paper aims to draw on the trust-commitment theory and the framework of service-dominant marketing logic to investigate the potential effect of trust at both brand and service personnel level on consumers’ value co-creation behaviour.

The study adopts a consumer perspective to investigate and interpret consumers’ value co-creation behaviour. The measurement scales were developed based on literature review and findings from focus group study. Survey interviews were undertaken in the USA and Hong Kong so as to test the potential moderator effect of country.

Effort-in-use and service co-design behaviour are two aspects of value cocreation behaviour. The findings provide theoretical expansion of the theory on value cocreation in two ways and suggest to discriminate the effect of consumer trust on and role in value cocreation behaviour at brand and service employee levels. Besides, the relationships among “trust in employee”, “trust in brand”, effort in use behaviour, service co-design behaviour, and customers’ perceived value actually could be moderated by country factor.

The study only focuses on the behavioural dimension of value cocreation behaviour but provides a number of suggestions on how to expand the domain of the measurement scale for value co-creation behaviour, cultural influences and customer perceived value and identifies several potential moderators such as reputation of the service brand and type of service for future research.

The findings provide important insights to service marketers on how to adopt appropriate service strategy, service operation, marketing communications and service training to facilitate consumers’ value co-creation behaviour.

The present study represents the first attempt to investigate the potential impact of consumer trust at different levels on customers’ value cocreation behaviour. It explains the connections between trust as an antecedent to value cocreation under different country contexts, thereby adding new knowledge in both domains.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influencing factors on cattle breeders’ payment system choices using cross-sectional data collected in the Brazilian states of Mato Grosso do Sul and Rio Grande do Sul. The investigation aims to analyze the problem of value appropriation comparing the payment based on carcass index with live weight mode under the perspective of “bovine for slaughtering” as a multidimensional product with various attributes.

This study employs a generalized order logistic regression model in a survey with 69 cattle breeders’ interview to conduct the empirical analysis.

The empirical results show that measurement difficulties and collective actions influence farmers’ choice to a less efficient payment system in quality terms and value appropriation problems, while the trust level in the slaughterhouse pushes to a more efficient system. Furthermore, trust was presented as more important than technological aspects and long-time relationship as well as collective action corroborates to increase bargaining power and to solve conflicts. In sum, trust, measurement and bargaining power brought traditional and alternative solutions to solve conflicts such as well-designed payment indicators, collective actions and transaction costs.

This study used first-hand survey and proxy variables on cattle farmers’ payment system choices. Another contribution is the focus on two regions with two different payment systems in the same institutional environment in a way to suggest mechanisms of private strategies and public policy to reduce opportunistic value appropriation as well as decreasing conflict.

Ambient service provisioning with the least human participation in a pervasive computing environment, which is composed of interconnected devices and sensors, raises several trust and security issues. Accurate measuring of the integrity of the nodes that are willing to interact in this intimate environment can boost the trust evolution process, particularly in the uncertainty state and initiation phase. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The paper presents a unified approach in calculating the trust value among the nodes by leveraging some trusted computing functionalities. The approach aggregates different trust metrics like context, recommendation, and history to compute the trust index of each party more accurately. The paper also describes several existing remote attestation techniques including the chosen attestation technique for the model. The paper simulated the behaviour of the model in different scenarios and evaluates its responsiveness when the trustworthiness among peer nodes can be attested.

The results obtained from different simulated scenarios demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed model. It is shown that trust evaluation process in the proposed model is very granular and also can be fine-tuned according to the application and context. The model strength in solving the uncertain situations and assigning appropriate initial trust values is shown, as well. Finally, the paper describes the future research plan to evaluate the accuracy of the model.

The novel idea of applying remote attestation in trust determination may open up new avenues of research in the study of trust management and trust models.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a study in which a previously validated measurement instrument is used to investigate the existence and importance of specific factors that are thought to predict the generation of consumer trust in internet shopping in Ireland.

A sample of 858 individuals was surveyed using a previously validated measurement instrument that focused on a number of key constructs identified in the literature as potential trust predictors.

The study results provide evidence that Irish consumers' trust in internet shopping is the result of specific factors, the first of which relates to the vendor's perceived integrity, and the second of which relates to the vendor's perceived competence. The former encompasses social antecedents of trust, while the latter encompasses the technical antecedents of trust.

The insights provided by this research make a valuable contribution not only to information systems research, but also to the overall body of marketing, trust and diffusion research. The findings of this research are of potential benefit to online vendors of all types who seek to engender consumer trust in their web sites.