Enabling Inter-Organizational Collaboration Through Platforms: The Role of Trust: A Game-Based Assessment in the Transport & Logistics Sector

Platform technologies permeate Business-to-Business (B2B) environments, including the transport and logistics sector. For example, in the transport and logistics sector, a shipper can use a booking platform for transportation of goods allowing them to collaborate with many different known or unknown organizations. Platforms can be seen as networks where supply and demand come together, where interactions occur, and where parties collaborate in an impersonal environment. In this context, trust is essential to reduce risks and uncertainties arising from the impersonal nature of platforms.

When using platforms, organizations often find it challenging to obtain complete and reliable information about another party, interpret their behaviour, and verify the identity of the other organizations. Trust supports collaboration by ensuring that mutual expectations are met. This trust can stem from past experiences or available information about a party.

With the rise of platforms and potential information asymmetry, it is crucial to investigate how trust contributes to collaboration on platforms. This study focuses on the influence of trust and how platform-mediated collaboration can be enhanced. The main research question is as follows: How does inter-organizational trust influence collaborations mediated by platforms in the transport and logistics sector? Through in-depth interviews with stakeholders and the design of the simulation game FreightBooking the main research question is answered. The objective of this study is to formulate suggestions for users of a platform on how to deal with trust when collaborating through a platform. Based on a literature review, interviews, and a game experiment, findings suggest when organizations collaborate through a platform, organizations should be aware that trust in the other organization is strongly connected to trust in the platform, the platform organization, and the platform community. Subsequently, experience plays a crucial role, both in assessing the overall trustworthiness of the community (i.e., is the overall community trustworthy?) and in evaluating a specific organization's trustworthiness (i.e. is the organization with whom I want to collaborate trustworthy?).