Research On Trust Relationship Evolution Between Software Outsourcing Cooperative Enterprises

As an important branch of the service outsourcing industry, software outsourcing is increasingly becoming a new bright spot in promoting China’s economic growth. Trust is one of the key factors in promoting the successful cooperation of the software outsourcing. Researches about trust in the field of software outsourcing mainly focus on verifying the impact of trust on the performance of software outsourcing cooperation as well as analyzing the factors which influence the establishment and maintenance of trust. The study on the trust transformation among enterprises which is from the perspective of dynamic development is relatively limited.Firstly, on the basis of previous studies, this paper proposes the conception of priori trust combining with the actual situation of software outsourcing. This trust is a low-level and unstable, which is generated prior to the formal cooperation. Trust can be divided into four types from the perspectives of time and system development, which are priori trust, calculus-based trust, knowledge-based trust and identification-based trust. They are ordered and identification-based trust is the highest level of trust. Basing on elaborating the basic meaning and process of change of these four kinds of trust and combining the development characteristics of partnership which is from scratch and eventually developed into a mature stage, this paper builds a theoretical model of the evolution of trust relationship.Secondly, this paper selects four software outsourcing cooperation between Chinese and Japanese enterprises as research objects and uses the method of multi-case analysis to discuss the evolution process of trust relationship from the perspective of the generating and building process, the upgrading process as well as the reducing process of trust. Combining with the development process of outsourcing relationship, this paper summarizes a two-phase evolution path of trust relationship. The first phase corresponds to tactical outsourcing relationship and shows that the change of trust started before the formal cooperation including priori trust, calculus-based trust and knowledge-based trust. The second phase corresponds to strategic and transformational outsourcing relationship and describes the change of trust during the long-term outsourcing cooperation. It starts from the knowledge-based trust and develops into identification-based trust eventually.At last, this paper gives a supplementary explanation on the key nodes in the evolution of trust in the theoretical model and makes a further analysis of the game process in facing the selection process of upgrading, maintaining and reducing trust. By using the evolutionary game approach and combining the parameters assumptions which are proposed by multi-case analysis conclusions, this paper constructs two game models respectively direct at the upgrading and reducing of trust relationship. This paper analyzes different evolutionary stable strategy and makes numerical simulation and recognizes the key parameters that affect the evolution of the trust policy eventually and makes appropriate recommendations accordingly.This paper uses multi-case study method and evolutionary game theory to analyze and verify the trust evolution path of the software outsourcing cooperation and obtains a series of conclusions, which can provide the theoretical and practical reference to the trust relationship governance for both sides, which can do well to facilitating trust upgrading and avoiding trust reducing.