IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/mul/jl9ury/doi10.1425-91629y2018i3p499-546.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Whom should you trust? The assessment of professional trustworthiness in the expert-client relationship

Author

Listed:
  • Greta Peretto
  • Maurizio Pisati

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to investigate how prospective clients assess the professional trustworthiness of experts in the pre-relational stage of their relationship, i.e., before the two parties establish a personal contact. To this aim, we carried out a full factorial experiment where sixty-four participants were asked first to picture themselves needing legal assistance, and then to rate their willingness to hire each of eight lawyers based on the information reported on the professionals' online personal profiles. Our analyses show that the level of professional trustworthiness attributed to lawyers by the experimental subjects mainly depends on three characteristics of the lawyers: the possession of specialized educational qualifications, the reputation held among colleagues, and the pursuit of philanthropic activities in leisure time. We conclude by highlighting some limitations of the study and suggesting possible venues for further research.

Suggested Citation

  • Greta Peretto & Maurizio Pisati, 2018. "Whom should you trust? The assessment of professional trustworthiness in the expert-client relationship," Stato e mercato, Società editrice il Mulino, issue 3, pages 499-546.
    • Handle: RePEc:mul:jl9ury:doi:10.1425/91629:y:2018:i:3:p:499-546
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.rivisteweb.it/download/article/10.1425/91629
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers
    File URL: https://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.1425/91629
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:mul:jl9ury:doi:10.1425/91629:y:2018:i:3:p:499-546. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.rivisteweb.it/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.