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Introduction
The relationship between trust and international joint venture (IJV) performance is complicated and contingent on other factors. While several studies propose trust as a key factor contributing to partners' performance (Bener and Glaister, 2010; Kwon, 2008; Gould et al. , 2016; Nielsen, 2007; de Pablo González del Campo et al. , 2014), some recent studies indicate that trust may not always improve IJV performance (Hsieh and Rodrigues, 2014; McEvily et al. , 2003; Mohr and Puck, 2013; Muthusamy et al. , 2007) unless contingency factors are taken into consideration. For example, Luo (2002) found that the positive effect of trust on performance in international strategic alliances strengthens with market uncertainty, resource interdependency, commensurate risk sharing and reciprocal commitment, and reverses with the increase in alliance age. Krishnan et al. (2006) found that the positive effect of trust on performance in international strategic alliances strengthens under behavioral uncertainty and reverses under environmental uncertainty. In addition, it is found that a positive trust-performance relationship strengthens with inter-partner similarities (Silva et al. , 2012) and it reverses with the increase in IJV size (Robson et al. , 2008). These studies suggest that the benefits derived from trust may magnify under certain conditions and diminish under other conditions. To extend research in this direction, identifying the contingency factors in an IJV relationship is crucial in understanding the influence of trust on the performance.
To investigate the contingency factors, we incorporate the perspective of theorists (Ali and Larimo, 2016; Hennart and Zeng, 2005; Jiang et al. , 2013; Liu et al. , 2009) who argue that trust involves vulnerability of trustor and does not guarantee that trusted party will reciprocate the good behavior. Langfred (2004) noted that, when team members trust one another, they do not exhibit monitoring to the same extent. The study finds that positive effect of trust on the performance of self-managing teams reverses when monitoring is low. Therefore, trust can be a liability when monitoring mechanisms are relaxed. This suggests that the relationship between trust and performance should be contingent on the factors that reduce opportunism in IJVs. However, extant research has not examined how the trust-performance relationship is contingent on structural mechanisms of IJVs that transaction cost economics (TCE) deem necessary to...