The role of inter-channel trust transfer in establishing mobile commerce trust

Mobile brokerage services represent an emerging application of mobile commerce in the brokerage industry. Compared with telephone-based trading services and online brokerage services, they have advantages such as ubiquity, convenience, and privacy. However, the number of investors using mobile brokerage services to conduct brokerage transactions is far smaller than those using other trading methods. A plausible reason for this is that investors lack initial trust in mobile brokerage services, which affects their acceptance of them. This research examines trust transfer as a means of establishing initial trust in mobile brokerage services. We analyze how an investor’s trust in the online brokerage services of a brokerage firm affects her cognitive beliefs about the mobile brokerage services of the firm and what other key factors influence the formation of initial trust in mobile brokerage services. We develop and empirically test a theoretical model of trust transfer from the online to the mobile channels. Our results indicate that trust in online brokerage services not only has a direct effect on initial trust but also has an indirect effect through other variables. This study provides useful suggestions and implications for academics and practitioners.     

Understanding Customer Trust in Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce, Web-Mediated Electronic Commerce, and Traditional Commerce

Customer trust is important in agent-mediated electronic commerce, web-mediated electronic commerce, and traditional commerce. However, the meaning of customer trust in these contexts has not been clearly defined or fully delineated. This paper proposes a new trust model that differentiates between cognitive trust and emotional trust, defines customer trust in each type of commerce as cognitive trust and emotional trust in the various entities (e.g., website, computer agent) that make up a commerce context, and then compares customer trust across the three types of commerce. We propose that, first, emotional trust merits research, particularly in e-commerce. Second, both awareness of the known and awareness of the unknown will be higher in e-commerce than in traditional commerce; this will lead to lower cognitive trust and emotional trust in e-commerce. Third, the key to increase customer trust in e-commerce is to design and develop technologies to reduce the distance between a customer and each entity, thereby increasing awareness of the known and decreasing awareness of the unknown. Fourth, cognitive trust and emotional trust fall along a continuum with potentially asymmetric effects on customer dependence on entities in e-commerce (e.g., computer agent adoption). Finally, future research on customer trust in e-commerce is outlined.     

What drives trust transfer from web to mobile payment services? The dual effects of perceived entitativity

Drawing from trust transfer theory, this study investigates cognitive trust and emotional trust transfer from web payment (WP) to mobile payment (MP) services with the emphasis on the effect of web–mobile payment relationship, namely, perceived entitativity. By conducting an online survey (n = 491), our study shows two key findings. First, cognitive trust and emotional trust can be transferred from WP to MP services, which, in turn, formulate intention to use MP services. Second, perceived entitativity not only increases cognitive trust and emotional trust in MP, but also enhances the transfer of cognitive trust and emotional trust from WP to MP services.     

Increasing trust in mobile commerce through design aesthetics

The growth of mobile commerce (m-commerce) has motivated a better understanding of how trust can be built on a mobile device. Researchers have previously examined design aesthetics (or visual aesthetics) of mobile website and incorporated a hedonic component of enjoyment in m-commerce domain, but the relationship between design aesthetics of mobile website design and customer trust in m-commerce has been rarely investigated. In this study, design aesthetics was enhanced to include a website characteristics component as important to trust development on the mobile Internet. This model was examined through an empirical study involving 200 subjects using structural equation modeling techniques. Our research found that design aesthetics did significantly impact website characteristics component, especially customization, perceived usefulness and ease of use, all of which were ultimately shown to have significant explanatory power in affecting customer trust.     

Honesty and trust revisited: the advantages of being neutral about other’s cognitive models

Open distributed systems pose a challenge to trust modelling due to the dynamic nature of these systems (e.g., electronic auctions) and the unreliability of self-interested agents. The majority of trust models implicitly assume a shared cognitive model for all the agents participating in a society, and thus they treat the discrepancy between information and experience as a source of distrust: if an agent states a given quality of service, and another agent experiences a different quality for that service, such discrepancy is typically assumed to indicate dishonesty, and thus trust is reduced. Herein, we propose a trust model, which does not assume a concrete cognitive model for other agents, but instead uses the discrepancy between the information about other agents and its own experience to better predict the behavior of the others. This neutrality about other agents’ cognitive models allows an agent to obtain utility from lyres or agents having a different model of the world. The experiments performed suggest that this model improves the performance of an agent in dynamic scenarios under certain conditions such as those found in market-like evolving environments.     

Factors affecting members' trust belief and behaviour intention in virtual communities

In this research we investigate whether antecedent factors of participant trust and institutional trust significantly influence members' trust belief towards virtual communities. Further, we investigate how members' trust levels affect their behaviour intention. A model of factors that affect members' trust in virtual communities is constructed. We analysed 625 valid online questionnaires obtained from virtual communities related to travel, games, and computer information. The findings suggest that benefit attraction and shared value have significant positive effects on building participant trust, and monitoring has a significant positive effect on building institutional trust. Trust building influences both members' stickiness in virtual communities and their willingness to share information. This research suggests that the extent to which members trust community-based website environments significantly influences their practical behaviour in such environments.     

Understanding the evolution of consumer trust in mobile commerce: a longitudinal study

Consumer trust in mobile commerce (m-commerce) is dynamic. However, little research has examined how consumer trust in m-commerce evolves over time. Based on the extended valence theory, the self-perception theory, and the information systems expectation confirmation theory, this study examines a three-stage theoretical model of consumer trust evolution in mobile banking. We focus on the formation mechanisms of a consumer’s decision in the pre-usage stage, the feedback mechanisms of usage behavior in the usage stage, and the evaluation mechanisms in the post-usage stage. By analyzing longitudinal data collected from 332 individuals through two rounds of surveys, we find that pre-use trust has both direct and indirect influences on mobile banking usage behavior. Usage behavior provides significant feedbacks on cognitive or psychological factors, and customers’ evaluations have significant impacts on satisfaction. Satisfaction enhances post-use trust, which in turn affects future usage behavior. We also find that pre-use trust has a long term impact on post-use trust. Together, these results illustrate the dynamic process through which m-commerce consumer trust transforms.     

Online trust: a stakeholder perspective, concepts, implications, and future directions

Online trust is important in both business-to-business and business-to-consumer e-business. Consumers and businesses, feeling the pressure of economic downturn and terrorism, increasingly look to buy from and do business with organizations with the most trusted Web sites and electronic networks. Companies' perception of online trust has steadily evolved from being a construct involving security and privacy issues on the Internet to a multidimensional, complex construct that includes reliability/credibility, emotional comfort and quality for multiple stakeholders such as employees, suppliers, distributors and regulators, in addition to customers. Further, trust online spans the end-to-end aspects of e-business rather than being just based on the electronic storefront. Based on a review of selected studies, we propose a stakeholder theory of trust, articulate a broad conceptual framework of online trust including its underlying elements, antecedents, and consequences, and propose some promising future research avenues in online trust. This paper will help information systems professionals better understand the online trust perspectives of multiple stakeholders, the antecedents and consequences, thereby enabling them to build more trustworthy Web sites.     

Modelling and testing consumer trust dimensions in e-commerce

Prior research has found trust to play a significant role in shaping purchase intentions of a consumer. However there has been limited research where consumer trust dimensions have been empirically defined and tested. In this paper we empirically test a path model such that Internet vendors would have adequate solutions to increase trust. The path model presented in this paper measures the three main dimensions of trust, i.e. competence, integrity, and benevolence. And assesses the influence of overall trust of consumers. The paper also analyses how various sources of trust, i.e. consumer characteristics, firm characteristic, website infrastructure and interactions with consumers, influence dimensions of trust. The model is tested using 365 valid responses. Findings suggest that consumers with high overall trust demonstrate a higher intention to purchase online.     

An investigation of the effect of online consumer trust on expectation, satisfaction, and post-expectation

This study proposes a framework regarding the relationship between consumer trust, satisfaction, expectation, and post-expectation in the context of electronic commerce. In particular, the framework draws together from three theories: social exchange theory, expectation-confirmation theory, and post-acceptance model of IS continuance. Following the longitudinal pre-purchase and post-purchase stages, this study provides a theoretical framework combining trust, expectation, satisfaction, and post-expectation (i.e., perceived usefulness) and tests the proposed model empirically using Internet consumer behavior data collected via two rounds of Web surveys. The empirical findings suggest that both consumer’s trust and expectation have positive influences on consumer’s satisfaction; a significant and positive relationship is detected between consumer’s trust and expectation; customer’s satisfaction and perceived usefulness as post-expectation belief are important predictors of repurchase intention. In consequence, the study provides a framework explaining the subsequent relationships of trust, expectation, confirmation, satisfaction, post-expectation, and repurchase intention (i.e., consumer trust → expectation → confirmation → satisfaction → post-expectation → repurchase intention) across pre-purchase and post-purchase stages. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Gen Y customer loyalty in online shopping: An integrated model of trust,user experience and branding

Generational theory posits that generational cohorts develop similar attitudes and beliefs. Gen Y, Millennials, will become the largest customer segment for hotels worldwide. This group likes to travel and prefers to spend money on experiences rather than materialistic items. Their responses to online marketing is expected to be different as they process website information five times faster than older generations and are the most emotional and least loyal customers compared to all other generations. The aim of this research is to develop and test a comprehensive model that explains how Gen Y develops loyalty to a hotel booking website. To test the research model, an online survey was distributed to a systematic random sample of 2500 Gen Yers. Findings highlight that trust is the most important antecedent of e-loyalty in online shopping for Gen Y customers. Brand equity is also a key precursor of e-loyalty. Finally, a positive online experience (flow), is also a significant precursor of e-loyalty for this cohort.     

Intuition,risk, and the formation of online trust

Understanding how consumers evaluate website trustworthiness is a critical factor for online vendors. The dominant view espouses a deliberative trust formation process whereby shoppers evaluate security certificates, return policies, user feedback and the like, implying a highly rational underlying trust calculus. In this paper we use a laboratory experiment to explore an alternative perspective, based on the non-rational associative reasoning approach. Our findings show that when faced with a no-risk hypothetical decision about whether or not they would purchase a book from an online bookseller, subjects’ decision-making processes were indeed consistent with the dominant deliberative view. However, when confronted with a decision entailing risk (i.e., sharing sensitive personal information with an unknown website), subjects became reliant on their non-rational, gut-level intuition. We adopt a dual-process reasoning theory to make sense of these findings, and recommend that vendors take into account associative reasoning factors when designing online interfaces. Future research directions are provided.     

Development of application-based mobile-service trust and online trust transfer: an elaboration likelihood model perspective

Many firms are developing application-based mobile services (ABMS) as a complementary channel to their online service. Although perceptions of the ABMS determine trust in the ABMS, trust transfer from the online channel plays a role in the formation of ABMS trust. Applying the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) to the study, two objectives were pursued: (1) to investigate the role different influence processes play in the formation of ABMS trust and (2) to assess whether the effects of these influences vary across users, and if so, how. Data collected from 344 users of the online services of a price-comparison service also offering an ABMS were analysed. Based on the ELM, central and peripheral routes of information processing were identified in the formation of ABMS trust. The central routes of information processing that play a role are the influence of online-service trust and ABMS perceived usefulness on ABMS trust, while the influence of ABMS perceived ease-of-use on ABMS trust emerged as a peripheral cue. Furthermore, online-service trust is also a peripheral cue for ABMS perceived ease-of-use. Other theoretical contributions offered by this study are findings that show that ABMS self-efficacy and online-service use influence information processing, but use different ELM routes.     

Examining WeChat users’ motivations,trust, attitudes,and positive word-of-mouth: Evidence from China

WeChat is a mobile instant text and voice messaging communication service and has become an important social media platform in China. The objectives of this article are to examine the effects of psychological motivations (entertainment, sociality, and information) and trust on WeChat users’ attitudes and to assess the influence of users’ attitudes and their trust on positive word-of-mouth. This study represents one of the few that empirically investigates WeChat users’ motives, attitudes, trust, and their associated behavior. The research model was tested using data randomly collected from the database of Sojump. The numbers of valid observations were 264. Structure equation modeling was employed to verify and validate the research model. The outcomes confirm the path effects showing that entertainment, sociality, information, and trust positively influence WeChat users’ attitudes and users’ trust and their attitudes significantly affect positive WOM. The research results provide insight into how WeChat can motivate users and build their trust to improve their attitudes which in turn will increase WeChat users’ willingness in making positive comments on products and services.     

User bias in online trust systems: aligning the system designers’ intentions with the users’ expectations

The advent of social networks opened a myriad opportunities for merging the social character of trust with the technical possibilities offered by the Internet and its availability as a mobile service. While most of the computational trust models aim to detect trustworthy entities, much less attention is paid to how these models are perceived by the users who are the core of the system. This paper delves into the workings of online trust systems under user bias and analyses the user behaviour through biases defined by Prospect theory. By performing empirical study on an existing system, we are able to demonstrate that there is a huge discrepancy between the aim of implementation of the online trust models and the users’ perception of those models. Understanding of this relation by the system designers can reduce complexity and improve the user experience and the system performance. The results imply that the tendency of the users to exhibit cognitive biases is not only the cause, but also the effect from the trust system design. These results and the analysis are then used to propose to the system designers a methodology for user bias identification and mitigation in the form of a Choice architecture for trust systems.     

Strategies for predicting local trust based on trust propagation in social networks

Trust plays a critical role in determining social interactions in both online and offline networks, and reduces information overload, uncertainties and risk from unreliable users. In a social network, even if two users are not directly connected, one user can still trust the other user if there exists at least one path between the two users through friendship networks. This is the result of trust propagation based on the transitivity property of trust, which is “A trusts B and B trusts C, so A will trust C”. It is important to provide a trust inference model to find reliable trust paths from a source user to an unknown target user, and to systematically combine multiple trust paths leading to a target user. We propose strategies for estimating level of trust based on Reinforcement Learning, which is particularly well suited to predict a long-term goal (i.e. indirect trust value on long-distance user) with short-term reward (i.e. direct trust value between directly connected users). In other words, we compare and evaluate how the length of available trust paths and aggregation methods affects prediction accuracy and then propose the best strategy to maximize the prediction accuracy.     

面向决策的信任融合模型研究

信任关系模型无论是在现实生活中还是在开放网络中都是最复杂的社会关系模型之一,是一个很难度量的抽象的心理认知,因为它涉及假设、期望、行为和环境等多种因素。借鉴以往的研究经验,综合考虑多种信任关系要素,提出了一种新的面向决策的信任融合模型。该模型基于直接信任度、间接信任度和信誉值的演化,依据信任融合获得决策信任度,为主体评判下一次的交互提供依据。为了证明信任融合模型的有效性,假设客体在ω类活动中以期望为PωX的概率从事该项活动。实验证明,信任融合模型得到的决策信任度和客体可信度的差异明显小于直接信任度、间接信任度或信誉值。     

Exploring the influence of personal schema on trust transfer and switching costs in brick-and-click bookstores

Due to competition, most firms try to retain and lock in customers; this is likely to ensure a greater market profit than that gained by acquiring new customers. While many studies have investigated customer satisfaction and retention in online and offline firms, scant research exists on customer satisfaction and customer retention in the context of brick-and-click firms: i.e., those that conduct business both online and in stores. Such firms encourage trust transfer among their customers. However, most studies have failed to consider the role of personal schema in trust transfer. Based on social exchange, investment, and information integration theories, we analyzed the impact of trust transfer, switching costs, and personal schema on customer satisfaction and repurchase intentions in the context of an offline bookstore that has now launched an online business. Our results indicated that trust transfer and switching costs had a small effect on customer satisfaction and repurchase intentions. Personal schema, however, affected both customer satisfaction and repurchase intention.     

Uncovering the dual influence processes for click-through intention in the mobile social platform: An elaboration likelihood model perspective

The burgeoning growth of mobile social platforms has gained the attention of advertisers, and the way how to stimulate users’ click-through intention in the virtual social community is becoming a research focus of scholars. Drawing on the elaboration likelihood model (ELM), this study develops a theoretical framework to examine the mediation effects of cognitive vs. affective trust on the relationship between dual routes (central route vs. peripheral route) and users’ click-through intention in the context of mobile social platforms. Particularly, users’ prior product experience is incorporated in the research model to examine its moderating effect on the influence processes. A scenario-based survey is conducted in China, and the partial least square method is used to analyze the data. Empirical results suggest that perceived content personalization is positively associated with cognitive trust, and its influence is stronger for experienced users with the recommended product. Social recommendation is positively associated with affective trust, and its impact is higher for users without prior product experience. Advertiser reputation is positively associated with both cognitive trust and affective trust, and its effect on cognitive trust is stronger for users without prior product experience, while its impact on affective trust is higher for users with prior product experience. Moreover, cognitive trust is positively associated with affective trust, and the two trust mechanisms have positive influences on click-through intention toward the recommended product. We discuss theoretical and practical implications in the final section.     

The trust model of enterprise purchasing for B2B e-marketplaces

Electronic commerce and online marketplaces have rapidly become critical transaction channels. Many studies of online marketing have focused on the purchasing behaviors of general buyers. However, many business to business (B2B) e-marketplaces allow professional procurement personnel from various businesses to electronically search for and purchase commodities; this facilitates price referencing and helps procurement personnel complete the tasks associated with direct purchasing functionalities. Despite this trend, few studies have examined the purchasing behavior of procurement personnel in B2B e-marketplaces. To fill this research gap, this study examines the relationships between trust in intermediaries and sellers; trust in commodity information; and the online purchase intentions of the procurement personnel in B2B e-marketplaces. This study also investigates the mediating effect of perceived value on the relationship between trust in commodity information and online purchase intention. The results indicate that the relationship between trust in commodity information and online purchase is mediated by perceived value. In addition, both intermediary trust and seller trust positively and significantly influence trust in commodity information, and intermediary trust positively influences seller trust. This finding is a valuable reference for professionals working in B2B e-marketplaces.