Understanding Customer Trust in Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce.. (Komiak and Benbasat, 2004, ITM)

Definition of Customer Trust

1. McKnight and Chervany’s model [63] consists of Disposition to Trust (from Psychology), Institution-based Trust (from Sociology), Trusting Beliefs, and Trusting Intentions (from Social Psychology).

2. Blomqvist [10] enumerates and differentiates among several related constructs, including competence, credibility, confidence, faith, hope, loyalty, and reliance. Blomqvist proposes that trust is an actor’s expectation of the other party’s competence and goodwill

3. Dwyer [26] proposes that trust can be conceptualized in one of three ways:
  (1) trust as a personality trait or generalized expectancy about the trustee’s competence and reliability [1,2,60],
  (2) trust as a predisposition toward another or belief that another will behave in a matter beneficial to the other party
  (3) trust from the standpoint of risking behaviors, that reflects a willingness on the part of the buyer to accept the possibility of vulnerability on her part in the transaction [35,61,69,94].

4. Trust is based on a cognitive process (i.e., good rational reasons), an emotional base (i.e. a strong positive affect for the trustee), and behavioral enactment (i.e. the undertaking of a risky course of action on the confident expectation
the all people involved in the action will act competently and dutifully) [53].

5. conceptual types [63], the direct objects of trust [64], and trust in some specific characteristics of a trustee [63].
 (1) regarding conceptual types, most researchers define customer trust as belief [2,18,60,70,83,94], while some define
customer trust as attitude [33,48] or dispositions [29,69,90].
 (2) regarding the direct objects of trust, most researchers focus on customer trust in a salesperson [18,23,92], while others mention customer trust in a company [1,60], or customer trust in a salesperson, product, and company [77].
 (3) Regarding trust in the characteristics of a trustee, some researchers suggest three characteristics – competence, integrity, and benevolence [18,61] or competence, goodwill, and contractual [82], while others suggest two characteristics – competence and goodwill [7,10,23,62,82] or credibility and goodwill [23,29], or four – competence,
benevolence, integrity, and predictability [63]

Propsed Model

6. The conceptual models of trust in prior research are concerned primarily with cognitive trust while they largely ignore emotional trust. However, both cognitive trust and emotional trust merit research because human thought includes both cognition and emotion [53,58]. A customer always both thinks and feels trust.

7. Cognitive trust is defined as a customer’s rational expectation that a trustee will have the necessary competence, benevolence, and integrity to be relied upon.

8. Emotional trust is defined as the extent that a trustor feels secure and comfortable about relying on a trustee [92,93].

3D Framework of Customer Trust

9. To better understand customer trust, we propose a 3-D framework of customer trust. In addition to Entities and Dimensions, “Interactions” is added as the third dimension, because the interaction history is important for trust development

10. In terms of “Interactions”, there are three levels of trust: before-interaction trust, initial interaction trust, and repeated-interaction trust.
 (1) Before any direct interaction between a customer and an entity, customer trust may build through the third party
[23,47,55].
 (2) During the initial interaction, customer trust, especially emotional trust, may be developed through categorization processes (unit grouping process, reputation categorization process, and stereotyping process) [47,66] and through an “illusion of control” process [50,66].
 (3) During repeated interactions, a customer will gain more knowledge about an entity (e.g., a product delivered by an online company vs. the product information on this company’s website).