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Evidence suggests that consumers often hesitate to transact with Web-based vendors because of uncertainty about vendor behavior or the perceived risk of having personal information stolen by hackers. Trust plays a central role in helping consumers overcome perceptions of risk and insecurity. Trust makes consumers comfortable sharing personal information, making purchases, and acting on Web vendor advice-behaviors essential to widespread adoption of e-commerce. Therefore, trust is critical to both researchers and practitioners. Prior research on e-commerce trust has used diverse, incomplete, and inconsistent definitions of trust, making it difficult to compare results across studies. This paper contributes by proposing and validating measures for a multidisciplinary, multidimensional model of trust in e-commerce. The model includes four high-level constructs-disposition to trust, institution-based trust, trusting beliefs, and trusting intentions-which are further delineated into 16 measurable, literature-grounded subconstructs. The psychometric properties of the measures are demonstrated through use of a hypothetical, legal advice Web site. The results show that trust is indeed a multidimensional concept. Proposed relationships among the trust constructs are tested (for internal nomological validity), as are relationships between the trust constructs and three other e-commerce constructs (for external nomological validity)-Web experience, personal innovativeness, and Web site quality. Suggestions for future research as well as implications for practice are discussed.
(Trust; Trusting Beliefs; Trusting Intentions; Institution-Based Trust; Disposition to Trust; eCommerce; Measure; Site Quality; Disposition; Nomological Network; Web Vendor)
Introduction
The trust factor opens up or closes down the pace and nature of electronic commerce growth. .. . Trust is so multifaceted. . . . What exactly is trust? It's so easy to talk about, so hard to pin down.-Keen et al. (1999)
The Internet promises to revolutionize the shopping and information-gathering choices available to consumers. However, the enormous potential of 132C commerce (Wang et al. 1998) can only be realized if consumers feel comfortable transacting over the new medium with unfamiliar vendors (Gefen and Straub 2002). Yet, "almost 95% of consumers have declined to provide personal information to Web sites"-63% of these indicated this is "because they do not 'trust' those collecting the data" (Hoffman et al. 1999, p. 82). This suggests that consumer decisions to adopt B2C commerce involve not only perceptions of the technology (e.g., perceived usefulness and ease of use;...