The Empirical Research On Consumers’ Trust Of The Natural Monopoly Enterprise

In recent years, "problems of integrity", "trust crisis" is clearly a hot topic and important research task of enterprises both at home and abroad. For natural monopolies, the trust of their client was always ignored because of the nature of their enterprises and economic status,which is not good for the natural monopolies to enhance their economic efficiency, nor to have a healthy development,in the long run. To make things worse,once the fields open to competition, these enterprises are expected to lose or even be forced out of market, because of their inherent in the concept of the past. Thus, the time for these enterprises to enhance their competitive strength and attractiveness is limited,and to acheive this,only two options left:1,to upgrade the strength of the enterprises.2,to have get the loyalty of consumers.Enterprises not only have to re-examine their own behavior, but also to think from the perspective of consumers,to grasp the trust of their consumers. Why will consumers trust the company?int’s not a question of very important practical meaning,but also of theoretical significance. To answer this, we solved three basic problems,using empirical research methods:first,the measure dimensions of consumer trust. Their are so many different concepts of trust in different situations, therefor, we must have the word trust defined as clearly as possible, for it’s a basic premise to have the trust of consumers measured correctly. This requires us not only to get to understand the background knowledges of trust from existing researches, but also to obtain fresh nutrients from studies of economic behavior to detect how consumers think of their trust to the monopolies. To this end,apart from the reviewing on relevant researches, the author also did a great deal of qualitative research among consumers. After combining these previous task, the author defined trust as below:’trust is an attitude, whose intensity is affected by three factors, the social structure, characteristics of partners(the object of trust),and one’s own ability. Basically,trust is an attitude after estimating weather the behavior of trust objects or the structure of organization can satisfy one’s own willing and demand. Trust is the medium of exchange and communication,the basis for further cooperation and development.’ The author distinguished interpersonal trust and institutional trust, and make institutional trust the major measurement of this study; the trust consumers have to nature monopolies, is in fact an reflection of the level of trust to expert system and the social system. The author finished the operationalization of institutional trusts interpersonal trust and the characteristics of individuals, and built a model of the relationship between them. At last,the author fixed the integrity of relationship and pathes to impact each other among these three. Through an investigation among clients of Huizhou Gas company,the author proved:Firstly,the institutional trust includes a number of measuring dimensions of trust, not just institution itself;Secendly,it seems individual characteristics have less impact on institution trust than we have expected, we can only say individual characteristics only have partly impacted the level of consumers’ trust to enterprises; 3,the level of individual interpersonal trust and the level of institutional trust does have a positive correlation. The author made some further analysis through the use of structural equation modeling software AMOS, on the influential factors,and the results goes:1, geographical relations、blood relations、rational trust and positive trust in interpersonal trust have an phenomenal impact on the consumers’ daily use satisfaction, among which the level of trust in blood and geographic relations played an negative part, and there is an positive relationship between positive trust and rational trust.2, degree of consumer recognition for businesses profound impact on their trust to the enterprise.3, The natural monopolies and the government shared a same level of trust, the degree of institutional trust have an positive correlation with that of government.The innovation of this study are:1,in the current context when China’s economy is developing strongly, seldom have set foot to study the level of consumers’ trust to expert and institution system. The former researches on natural monopolies generally based on the macro level,almost no analysis on consumer level.2, this study combined lots of methods to establish model of the impact factors of consumers’ institution trust.3, The study provided several micro-level approaches to improve the performance of the natural monopolies.