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.

Developing and Validating Trust Measures for e-Commerce: An Integrative Typology

How to ... be a reflective practitioner.

The theory of affordances

Are trust and risk important in consumers' electronic commerce purchasing decisions? What are the antecedents of trust and risk in this context? How do trust and risk affect an Internet consumer's purchasing decision? To answer these questions, we i) develop a theoretical framework describing the trust-based decision-making process a consumer uses when making a purchase from a given site, ii) test the proposed model using a Structural Equation Modeling technique on Internet consumer purchasing behavior data collected via a Web survey, and iii) consider the implications of the model. The results of the study show that Internet consumers' trust and perceived risk have strong impacts on their purchasing decisions. Consumer disposition to trust, reputation, privacy concerns, security concerns, the information quality of the Website, and the company's reputation, have strong effects on Internet consumers' trust in the Website. Interestingly, the presence of a third-party seal did not strongly influence consumers' trust.

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A trust-based consumer decision-making model in electronic commerce: The role of trust, perceived risk, and their antecedents

Evidence exists that service quality delivery through Web sites is an essential strategy to success, possibly more important than low price and Web presence. To deliver superior service quality, managers of companies with Web presences must first understand how customers perceive and evaluate online customer service. Information on this topic is beginning to emerge from both academic and practitioner sources, but this information has not yet been examined as a whole. The goals of this article are to review and synthesize the literature about service quality delivery through Web sites, describe what is known about the topic, and develop an agenda for needed research.

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Service Quality Delivery Through Web Sites: A Critical Review of Extant Knowledge

trust Online T rust matters. It allows us to reveal vulnerable parts of ourselves to others and to know others intimately in return. A climate of trust eases cooperation among people and fosters reciprocal caretaking. The resources—physical, emotional, economic—that would otherwise be consumed guarding against harm can be directed toward more constructive ends. Here, we explore the nature of trust and how and where it flourishes online. We also seek to make sense of seemingly disparate perceptions. For example, some say the public is too trusting online; without thinking, people routinely download software likely to destroy important information or blithely engage in e-auctions or chat rooms with strangers. Others say the public does not trust enough, that people refrain, for example, from e-commerce under the mistaken belief that their financial transactions are not secure. How can we know if the trust we choose to give or withhold is warranted? Can we trust machines or other technological systems? How can those of us who create and maintain the technological infrastructure help establish a climate of trust? Addressing such questions, we provide a conceptual framework for understanding trust, then offer 10 characteristics of online interaction that can help engineer trust online and distinguish between trust in e-commerce activities and trust in online interpersonal interactions.

Trust online

INTRODUCTION The idea that values may be embodied in technical systems and devices (artifacts) has taken root in a variety of disciplinary approaches to the study of technology, society, and humanity (Winner 1986; Latour 1992; Hughes 2004; MacKenzie and Wajcman 1985). A pragmatic turn from this largely descriptive posture sets forth values as a design aspiration, exhorting designers and producers to include values, purposively, in the set of criteria by which the excellence of technologies is judged. If an ideal world is one in which technologies promote not only instrumental values such as functional efficiency, safety, reliability, and ease of use, but also the substantive social, moral, and political values to which societies and their peoples subscribe, then those who design systems have a responsibility to take these latter values as well as the former into consideration as they work. (See, for example, Friedman and Nissenbaum 1996, Mitcham 1995, and Nissenbaum 1998.) In technologically advanced, liberal democracies, this set of such values may include liberty, justice, enlightenment, privacy, security, friendship, comfort, trust, autonomy, and sustenance. It is one thing to subscribe, generally, to these ideals, even to make a pragmatic commitment to them, but putting them into practice, which can be considered a form of political or moral activism, in the design of technical systems is not straightforward. Experienced designers will recall the not too distant past when interface, usability, and even safety were overlooked features of software system design.

Embodying values in technology: Theory and practice

Reports on one of the first efforts to apply value-sensitive design (VSD) to a large-scale real-world software system. We sought to improve informed consent in Web-based interactions through the development of new technical mechanisms for cookie management. We describe our VSD methodology, explicate criteria for informed consent in online interactions and summarize how current browsers fall short with respect to those criteria. Next, we identify four goals for the redesign of current browsers. These goals, in turn, initiate an iterative design process that lies at the heart of the VSD methodology wherein we move among the design and implementation of new technical mechanisms, formative evaluation and the design goals coupled with the criteria for informed consent online. Key mechanisms include peripheral awareness of cookies and just-in-time interventions. At various phases in the design process, we implement our design improvements in the Mozilla browser (the open source for Netscape Navigator).

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Informed consent in the Mozilla browser: implementing value-sensitive design

Significant work in the CHI community has focused on designing systems that support human values. Designers and engineers have also become increasingly aware of ways in which the artifacts they create can embody political, social, and ethical values. Despite such an awareness, there has been little work towards producing practical methodologies that systematically incorporate values into the design process. Many designers struggle to find a balance between their own values, those of users and other stakeholders, and those of the surrounding culture. In this paper, we present the RAPUNSEL project as a case study of game design in a values-rich context and describe our efforts toward navigating the complexities this entails. Additionally, we present initial steps toward the development of a systematic methodology for discovery, analysis, and integration of values in technology design in the hope that others may both benefit from and build upon this work.

https://www.tiltfactor.org/wp-content/uploads2/Values-at-Play.pdf

Values at play: design tradeoffs in socially-oriented game design

This study characterizes users' conceptions of web security. Seventy-two individuals, 24 each from a rural community in Maine, a suburban professional community in New Jersey, and a high-technology community in California, participated in an extensive (2-hour) semi-structured interview (including a drawing task) about Web security. The results show that many users across the three diverse communities mistakently evaluated whether a connection is secure or not secure. Empirically-derived typologies are provided for (1) conceptions of security based on users' verbal reasoning, (2) the types of evidence users depend upon in evaluating whether a connection is secure, and (3) conceptions of security as portrayed in users' drawings. Design implications are discussed.

Daniel C. Howe

Papers

Trust online

Embodying values in technology: Theory and practice

Informed consent in the Mozilla browser: implementing value-sensitive design

Values at play: design tradeoffs in socially-oriented game design

Users' conceptions of web security: a comparative study