IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-3-032-13957-3_2.html

Trust and Power in the Credit Relationship

In: Trust and Power in Consumer Credit Relationships

Author

Listed:
  • Damon Gibbons

    (Centre for Responsible Credit)

Abstract

This chapter analyses the consumer credit relationship through the interconnected concepts of trust and power. Drawing on the wider literature, it establishes trust as a reciprocal, two-way process, and introduces a seven-domain framework to assess the balance between trust and power in a relationship: coercion at entry, trustee power, control measures, reliance on guarantors or insurance, opportunities for repeated interaction, reciprocity, and breach handling. Application of this framework reveals a profound asymmetry: lenders exhibit weak trust, relying on rigid contracts, intensive monitoring, and punitive responses, while borrowers must extend high trust despite having little power and being coerced into relationships with credit reporting agencies. This configuration of low lender trust, high borrower trust, and strong lender power results in a system governed by surveillance and conditionality. The analysis provides a critical foundation for the book’s subsequent examination of information asymmetries and the development of its ‘trust intelligence’ approach to reform.

Suggested Citation

  • Damon Gibbons, 2026. "Trust and Power in the Credit Relationship," Springer Books, in: Trust and Power in Consumer Credit Relationships, chapter 2, pages 15-57, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-032-13957-3_2
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-032-13957-3_2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:spr:sprchp:978-3-032-13957-3_2. 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: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    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.