Buyer and seller relationship has been one of prominent issues of discussion especially in an emerging country’s economy. In many ways, both parties interact with each other and over time will create long term relationships which may benefit them. This study focuses on the dynamic of trust between the fisherman (seller) and their buyer and the relationship of trust towards business performance. A total of 98 hook and line tuna fisherman in Mabul Island, Semporna were interviewed using guided-completion questionnaires. The data collected was tested using SmartPLS. The study reveals that communication was the strongest variable influencing trust followed by price satisfaction, interdependency and information sharing. On the same note, cultural similarities and flexibility were found non-significant towards trust. The study also found that trust has no direct influence towards business performance. From a managerial perspective, in order to be successful, channel members need to develop, maintain and seek improvements on communication, information sharing, interdependency and price satisfaction variables within the supply chain. It will be beneficial for members in the value chain to adopt the usage of information technology gadgets to boost communication and information sharing within the industry thus strengthening interdependency among members of the tuna fishing industry. From a theoretical perspective, the findings were consistent with previous researchers who also found that communication, information sharing, interdependency and price satisfaction variables were the main actors in the buyer-seller relationship context specifically on the trust dynamic. .
Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) is a popular multi-criteria decision-making method that ranks the available alternatives by examining the ideal-positive and ideal-negative solutions for each decision criterion. The first step of using TOPSIS is to normalize the presence of incommensurable data in the decision matrix. There are several normalization methods, and the choice of these methods does affect TOPSIS results. As such, some efforts were made in the past to compare and recommend suitable normalization methods for TOPSIS. However, such studies merely compared a limited collection of normalization methods or used a noncomprehensive procedure to evaluate each method's suitability, leading to equivocal recommendations. This study, therefore, employed an alternate, comprehensive procedure to evaluate and recommend suitable benefit/cost criteria-based normalization methods for TOPSIS (out of ten methods extracted from past literature). The procedure was devised based on three evaluation metrics: the average Spearman's rank correlation, average Pearson correlation, and standard deviation metrics, combined with the Borda count technique.•The first study examined the suitability of ten benefit/cost criteria-based normalization methods over TOPSIS.•Users should combine the sum-based method and vector method into the TOPSIS application for safer decision-making.•The maximum method (version I) or Jüttler's-Körth's method has an identical effect on TOPSIS results.