Multidisciplinary Trust Conceptualization: A General Model for Customer Trust Building in e-Commerce

Abstract

Without trust, life in our complex and interdependent societies would be a disaster. Therefore, numerous of studies have been conducted by several researchers across various disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and electronic-commerce. Despite its importance which garnered the attention of many researchers from numerous research fields, trust has no general definition, and its concept varies depending on the field of study, and even within a given field, trust has different meanings. This leads both practitioners and researchers into a total confusion. In this paper, we first examine the antecedents variables of trust across the variety of definitions found in the literature, and based on a deeper analysis, we categorized all these variables into six groups according to their similarities found in the literature. After that, we propose a general model for building consumer's trust in electronic commerce. This conceptual model describes in high-level, constructs such as customer propensity to trust, Web-based trust, interpersonal trust, trusting intention and the related trust behavior of an e-consumer. It also suggests a construct of trusting beliefs in witnesses that we believe will affect e-consumer's final intention to trust or make any transactional decision with an unknown e-vendor. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014.