Where Should Fairness Judgment Be Anchored? Fairness as a Decision Heuristic for Achieving Inter-Firm Compliance

Achieving compliance from business partners is considered to be important for firms, yet the use of influence strategies to elicit compliance is one-sided and sometimes aggressive. Previous channel research suggests that a distributor’s fair judgment on supplier’s initiated project will lead to a compliance with it. This work extends the existing research by exploring the role of fairness judgment regarding overall business relationship in affecting compliance with general requests. A cross-cultural survey was conducted in Germany and China, and the results reveal that distributive fairness judgment, dependence and social bond have positive impacts on compliance. Furthermore, this work also investigates on the sources of inter-firm fairness judgment. General discussion and limitations are provided.