Our team is on break until January 7, 2026. Inquiries will be addressed shortly after our return. Thank you for your patience and happy holidays!
Repository logo
 

An Exploratory Review of Consumer Trust and Its Antecedents in e-Commerce

Files

Dissertation(659.24 KB)

Date

2003

Authors

Supervisor

Glynn, Mark

Item type

Dissertation

Degree name

Master of Business

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Auckland University of Technology

Abstract

There is a general agreement in literature that improving online trust between businesses and consumers would create a greater success for e-commerce. Building consumer trust in e-commerce and developing long-term relationships with consumers is the key to exploiting the potential of e-commerce (Grabner-Krauter and Kaluscha, 2003). Trust in the e-commerce context is a relatively new phenomenon and traditional trust research does not provide enough knowledge to explain and predict consumer trust in e-commerce. The conceptualizations of the trust construct and the relationship between trust and its antecedents are not theoretically derived nor thoroughly validated in e-commerce. Hence there is a need to examine the notion of trust in this emerging context. This study takes the form of a literature review, which integrates literature on e-trust by critically synthesizing and analysing articles published on the topic of consumer trust in e-commerce (e-trust). This approach is achieved by discussing trust in diverse disciplines which e-trust models are based on. Literature on the topic of antecedents of e-trust is selected and analysed, and the results and findings are presented at the end. The findings suggest that there still exist conceptual confusions of trust in e-commerce. The literature on consumer e-trust suffers because of the complexity and multi-dimensions of trust (Lewis and Weigert, 1985). This hinders empirical studies from examining a broader picture of consumer e-trust. Most of the selected literature is based on different theoretical foundations or disciplines and each study has focused on a selected aspect of the relationship between the on-line consumer, the Internet vendor and the Internet channel. This makes it difficult to compare and contrast the relationship between trust and the antecedents of trust in e-commerce. Disposition to trust (consumer’s personality trait), trustworthiness of the Internet vendor, and institutional trust are found to be major antecedents of consumer e-trust in this study.

Description

Keywords

Electronic commerce -- New Zealand, Consumers -- Attitudes, Trust

Source

DOI

Publisher's version

Rights statement

Permanent link

https://hdl.handle.net/10292/11416

Collections

Masters Dissertations