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Most theories of relationship marketing emphasize the role of trust and commitment in affecting performance outcomes; however, a recent meta-analysis indicates that other mediating mechanisms are at work. Data from two studies—a laboratory experiment and a dyadic longitudinal field survey—demonstrate that gratitude also mediates the influence of a seller's relationship marketing investments on performance outcomes. Specifically, relationship marketing investments generate short-term feelings of gratitude that drive long-lasting performance benefits based on gratitude-related reciprocal behaviors. The authors identify a set of managerially relevant factors and test their power to alter customer perceptions of relationship marketing investments to increase customer gratitude, which can make relationship marketing programs more effective. Overall, the research empirically demonstrates that gratitude plays an important role in understanding how relationship marketing investments increase purchase intentions, sales growth, and share of wallet.

The assumption that economic actors behave in a boundedly self-interested manner promises fruitful new insights for strategic management. A growing literature spanning multiple disciplines indicates most actors' selfish utility maximizing behaviors are bounded by norms of fairness. Rather than being purely self-interested, people behave reciprocally by rewarding others whose actions they deem fair and willingly incurring costs to punish those they deem unfair. Economists show that employers who are perceived as distributionally fair by their employees generate comparatively more value due to the positively reciprocal behavior of those employees. The organizational justice literature distinguishes two additional types of fairness assessed by employees. Drawing from both these bodies of work, we employ stakeholder theory to propose how perceptions of fairness result in reciprocity (1) extending to all stakeholders of the firm and (2) affecting firm performance.

Cooperation is a hallmark of human society. Humans often cooperate with strangers even if they will not meet each other again. This so-called indirect reciprocity enables large-scale cooperation among nonkin and can occur based on a reputation mechanism or as a succession of pay-it-forward behavior. Here, we provide the functional and anatomical neural evidence for two distinct mechanisms governing the two types of indirect reciprocity. Cooperation occurring as reputation-based reciprocity specifically recruited the precuneus, a region associated with self-centered cognition. During such cooperative behavior, the precuneus was functionally connected with the caudate, a region linking rewards to behavior. Furthermore, the precuneus of a cooperative subject had a strong resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) with the caudate and a large gray matter volume. In contrast, pay-it-forward reciprocity recruited the anterior insula (AI), a brain region associated with affective empathy. The AI was functionally connected with the caudate during cooperation occurring as pay-it-forward reciprocity, and its gray matter volume and rsFC with the caudate predicted the tendency of such cooperaration. The revealed difference is consistent with the existing results of evolutionary game theory: although reputation-based indirect reciprocity robustly evolves as a self-interested behavior in theory, pay-it-forward indirect reciprocity does not on its own. The present study provides neural mechanisms underlying indirect reciprocity and suggests that pay-it-forward reciprocity may not occur as myopic profit maximization but elicit emotional rewards.

We examine cooperative behavior when large sums of money are at stake, using data from the television game show Golden Balls . At the end of each episode, contestants play a variant on the classic prisoner's dilemma for large and widely ranging stakes averaging over $20,000. Cooperation is surprisingly high for amounts that would normally be considered consequential but look tiny in their current context, what we call a \"big peanuts\" phenomenon. Utilizing the prior interaction among contestants, we find evidence that people have reciprocal preferences. Surprisingly, there is little support for conditional cooperation in our sample. That is, players do not seem to be more likely to cooperate if their opponent might be expected to cooperate. Further, we replicate earlier findings that males are less cooperative than females, but this gender effect reverses for older contestants because men become increasingly cooperative as their age increases. This paper was accepted by Brad Barber, Teck Ho, and Terrance Odean, special issue editors.

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) has proven to be a powerful technique for performance evaluation since its inception. Since the traditional DEA approaches lack discrimination power among efficient decision-making units (DMUs), the cross efficiency method has been proposed for peer appraisal in the literature. However, the previous cross efficiency approaches imposed a single and identical evaluation strategy across all DMUs simultaneously. In addition, all the related studies have considered a static issue without the dynamic alternation of evaluation strategies. In this paper, the reciprocal behaviors among DMUs are considered to address the cross efficiency evaluation, and a novel threshold value is used to determine positive or negative reciprocal behaviors by comparing the peer-evaluated efficiency with the threshold value based efficiency. This study assumes that a DMU would show positive behavior and apply a benevolent strategy toward other DMUs that evaluate it friendly, while it also shows negative behavior and apply an aggressive strategy toward DMUs that evaluate it hostilely. Furthermore, a game-like iteration process is developed for each DMU to determine and further adjust its evaluation strategy toward other DMUs in the evaluation process. Afterward, we calculate the optimal ultimate cross efficiency score with reciprocal behaviors. Finally, the proposed approach is applied to both a numerical example and an empirical study of 31 Chinese manufacturing industries to demonstrate its usefulness and efficacy.

This article complements the experimental literature that has shown the importance of reciprocity for behaviour in stylised labour markets or other decision settings. We use individual measures of reciprocal inclinations in a large, representative survey and relate reciprocity to real world labour market behaviour and life outcomes. We find that reciprocity matters and that the way in which it matters is very much in line with the experimental evidence. In particular, positive reciprocity is associated with receiving higher wages and working harder. Negatively reciprocal inclinations tend to reduce effort. Negative reciprocity increases the likelihood of being unemployed.

Trust and reciprocity are theoretically essential to strong democracies and efficient markets. Working from the theoretical frameworks of social identity and cognitive heuristics, this study draws on dual-process models of decision making to expect (1) the trustor to infer trustworthiness from partisan stereotypes and thus to discriminate trust in favor of co-partisans and against rival partisans, but (2) the trustee to base reciprocity decisions on real information about the trustor's deservingness rather than a partisan stereotype. So whereas partisanship is likely to trigger trust biases, the trust decision itself provides enough information to override partisan biases in reciprocity. The analysis derives from a modified trust game experiment. Overall, the results suggest partisanship biases trust decisions among partisans, and the degree of partisan trust bias is consistent with expectations from both social identity theory and cognitive heuristics. When it comes to reciprocity, however, information about the other subject's level of trust nullifies partisan bias.

Commonly, people are much nicer in response to friendly actions and much nastier and even brutal in response to hostile actions. In social psychology, such a phenomenon is called reciprocity. As an extension of the standard Stackelberg game, we propose a new allocation game framework with consideration of such reciprocal behavior. Specifically, we consider a situation in which the follower evaluates the leaders intention based on the leaders action and then may take either a positive or negative reciprocal action. We also apply the new framework in a supply chain pricing problem to investigate the impact of the retailer’s reciprocal behavior on pricing decisions, obtaining the following interesting results. First, the supplier should take into account the retailers personality and offer a wholesale price based on it. Second, while the retailer can benefit from his reciprocal behavior, the supplier suffers in most cases. Finally, the retailers reciprocal behavior can help alleviate the double marginalization effect, and thus lead to a performance improvement in the whole supply chain.

We analyze the driving factors of anomalistic patterns found in experimental studies related to bargaining games. In particular, we investigate whether the well-documented deviation from self-interested behavior can be partly, or entirely, attributed to revenge rather than fairness. Although, in general, related literature does not distinguish between the two latter notions, we highlight their differences and show that revenge significantly, and independently from the sense of fairness, contributes to decision-making in ultimatum games. Moreover, we show that, when controlling for various attributes, the hunger for revenge becomes the sole driving factor for both positively and negatively reciprocal behavior, rendering the sense of fairness insignificant. Our further cross-sectional analysis yields that gender differences are also very significant; however, the measured effects of fairness and revenge remain unaffected by this latter finding.

We provide the second mover in a trust game and a moonlighting game with an excuse for not reciprocating. While this type of manipulation has been shown to strongly reduce giving in the dictator game, we find that the availability of the excuse has no effect on the incidence of reciprocal behavior in these games. Our results cast doubt on the generalizability of previous dictator game findings and suggest that image concerns are not a key driver of reciprocal behavior.