A trust perspective to study the intentions of consumers to the group buying

Abstract

With the rapid development of Internet and electronic commerce, more and more innovative online business models have been proposed. Internet group buying, one of the most interesting model, has attracted much attentions. Due to the properties of Internet and group behavior, trust on the Internet and among the group are both important factors that would affect the success of Internet group buying. In this research, we constructed a research model based on trust theory and conducted an experiment to investigate the impacts of trust on Internet group buying. Under different trust scenarios in our experiment, the subjects are invited to participate in a group buying activity. The results show that, the consumers have different intention to attend a group buying activity in different trust scenarios. It also means that different trust perspectives have different impacts on the consumers, and trust is a critical factor for Internet group buying. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.