Investigating the Effect of Social Media on Trust Building
in Customer-supplier Relationships
Fabio Calefato, Filippo Lanubile and Nicole Novielli
Dept. of Computer Science, University of Bari, Via Orabona, 4, Bari, Italy
Keywords: Social Media, Cognitive Trust, Affective Trust, Empirical Study.
Abstract: Trust is a concept that has been widely studied in e-commerce since it represents a key issue in building
successful customer-supplier relationships. In this sense, social software represents a powerful channel for
establishing a direct communication with customers. As a consequence, companies are now investing in
social media for building their social digital brand and strengthening relationships with their customers. In
this paper we investigate the role of social media in the process of trust building, with particular attention to
the case of small companies. Our findings show that social media contribute to build affective trust more
than traditional websites, by fostering the affective commitment of customers.
1 INTRODUCTION
Nowadays, interpersonal communication is
increasingly affected by the wide diffusion of social
software. Most people and companies daily manage
their digital identity on multiple online social
networks. As an evidence of this, for example, the
current number of monthly active users of Facebook
has recently reached 1 billion, of which 655 million
are active on a daily basis.
Social software also holds great potential for
business as it represents a powerful marketing
channel for establishing a direct communication
with the customers (Blanchard, 2011). Several
companies are now investing in social media for
building their social digital brand and strengthening
trust-based relationships with their customers. The
reason for success of social media originates from
the possibility to manage relationships with
customers in a ‘people to people’ fashion. In fact,
trust building is a crucial issue in commerce (Büttner
and Göritz, 2008) and it is established with the
salesperson, rather than with respect to a brand
(Doney and Cannon, 1995). The sale forces play a
key role in interfacing with customers if they are
able to appeal to the peripheral route to persuasion
based on emotional appraisal (Petty and Cacioppo,
1986) Compared to traditional websites, social
media allow suppliers to realize this behavior in a
virtual environment and provide customers with the
possibility of perceiving a company as closer, more
reachable and concerned about their needs
(Blanchard, 2011). Aiming at enhancing trust
building, a company should consider exploiting
affective appraisal as a strategy. In this sense, social
media offer the possibility to surrogate the affective
channel of face-to-face traditional interaction with
customers and enhance their perception of a
company’s trustworthiness and benevolence
(Blanchard, 2011). This holds not only for large
enterprises but also for small companies, which can
benefit from the popularity of social networks as a
modern version of traditional word of mouth
(Tvesovat and Kouznetsov, 2011).
In this paper, we investigate the role of social
media on trust building in the very early stage of a
customer-supplier relationship, i.e., based on the
first impression provided by a company’s online
image. The study described in this paper extends a
previous pilot experiment performed with 19
students with background on computer science
(Calefato et al., 2013). The pilot study provided
insights on how to improve the design of the
experiment, with particular focus on the clear
distinction between the information elements
involved in the two web conditions (i.e. social media
vs. traditional websites). The remainder of the paper
is structured as follows. We first review the existing
theories on trust and provide explanation on how the
different information elements available in the two
web modalities (i.e., social media vs. traditional
635
Calefato F., Lanubile F. and Novielli N..
Investigating the Effect of Social Media on Trust Building in Customer-supplier Relationships.
DOI: 10.5220/0004905606350642
In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS-2014), pages 635-642
ISBN: 978-989-758-028-4
Copyright
c
2014 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
websites) relate to trust antecedents. Then, we
present our research hypothesis, the design and the
findings of our experiment. Hence, we discuss the
threats to validity. Finally, we conclude by providing
the discussion and directions for future work.
2 BACKGROUND AND
MOTIVATION
2.1 Definition of Trust and Trust Build
Trust is a concept that has been widely studied in
several research domains (Rusman et al., 2010),
from cognitive science (Castelfranchi and Falcone,
2000) to economy (Doney and Cannon, 1995), and
more recently also in software engineering (Al-Ani
and Redmiles, 2009; Schumann et al., 2013).
According to Hung et al. (2004), trust may be
defined as the belief that the trustee will behave
according to our expectation. As far as marketing is
concerned, several other definitions of trust have
been provided. We consider a good starting point the
one provided by Doney and Cannon (1995) who
define trust as “the perceived credibility and
benevolence of a target of trust”. Both definitions
involve the propensity of the trustor to take the risk
of trusting the trustee. The trustor’s decision is based
on both a cognitive and affective appraisal of
existing information about the trustee, either
statically available or dynamically derived from the
observation of the trustee’s behavior in a medium-
or long-term interaction.
2.2 Trust Modeling
The literature proposes several approaches for
fostering trust (Blanchard, 2011; Hacker et al., 2013)
and examines the nature of trust between persons
and in organizations (Doney and Cannon, 1995;
Mayer et al., 1995; Schoorman et al., 2007). The
underlying idea of these studies is that the process of
trust building mainly develops along several
dimensions that can be identified as trust antecedents
(Rusman, 2010), i.e., the properties of the trustee
that trigger the trustor’s cognitive appraisal when
assessing the trustworthiness of the others. With
respect to the commercial domain, the envisaged
model to adopt in this study is an extension of the
‘tripod’ model defined by Mayer et al. (1995), which
is highly consistent with the point of view of
researchers in this domain (Büttner and Göritz,
2008; Doney and Cannon, 1995). According to the
tripod model, the trustworthiness of a person or
organization is assessed in terms of ability,
benevolence, and integrity.
Ability is the capability of the trustee to complete
a task, meet an obligation, and provide the answer to
a request. It relates to the trustee’s professional
skills, knowledge and the competence. It may be
assessed by a trustor through the evaluation of
available professional information (e.g., the
description of the business as provided on a website
or the curriculum vitae of a person applying for a
job). Benevolence relates to the trustee level of
courtesy, positive attitude, availability, intention to
share information or resources, willingness to help,
kindness and receptivity. A trustee that meets this
requirement is usually perceived as caring about the
trustor’s needs and goals. Integrity relates to a set of
moral norms and trustee’s characteristics usually
considered as good as, for example, integrity,
honesty, fairness, loyalty, and discretion.
Regarding the commercial domain, McKnight et
al. (1998) extended this model with a fourth
dimension, that is, the predictability of the trustee’s
behavior. Predictability is related to the concept of
accountability by Rusman et al. (2010), i.e., the
degree to which a person (i.e., the supplier) meets
the expectations of the trustor (i.e., the purchaser) in
terms of reliability and consistence of behavior.
All the mentioned antecedents are critical in the
customer-supplier relationship. The customer
(trustor) will base evaluation of the perceived
trustworthiness and, hence, the decision to purchase
from a given supplier (the trustee) on the appraisal
of the available information in terms of his ability,
benevolence, integrity, and predictability.
2.3 Cognitive and Affective Trust
The process of trust building has been also analyzed
and defined by highlighting the difference between
cognitive and affective trust (McAllister, 1995).
Cognition-based trust involves deliberate appraisal
of the trustee characteristics combined with the
process of weighting the benefits of trusting over
risks (Hung et al., 2004; Wilson et al., 2006). On the
contrary, affective-based trust involves “one’s
emotional bonds and sincere concern for the well-
being of the others” (Hung et al., 2004). Consistently
with our previous research (Calefato et al., 2013), in
this study we maintain the mapping of the four
antecedents into the cognitive and affective appraisal
mechanism, as suggested in (Schumann et al., 2012).
Specifically, the ability and predictability
dimensions are assessed by means of cognitive
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elaboration of personal and professional
information. At the same time, affective-based
appraisal leads to trust building along the
dimensions of benevolence and integrity. Compared
to traditional websites, social media provide
customers with the possibility of assessing the
dynamic behavior of the company owners, that is,
their commitment in updating and sharing of
information and news and in responding to the
customers’ feedback.
3 RESEARCH GOAL
3.1 Study Domain
The focus of this work is to provide an insight on the
way social media affect trust building based on first
impression. The scenario is the one in which
customers, who don’t know the companies, need to
purchase a product by just relying on the
information on the Web. We selected two small
companies operating both in the food domain
because: (i) quality is assessed according to
common-sense based criteria; (ii) the evaluation
process does not require any particular skill or
knowledge. Company A is an organic restaurant
whereas company B is a manufacturer of cake and
bakery products. Both companies started their
activity about one year ago and developed marketing
strategies that involve strong web presence.
3.2 Research Hypothesis
In our model, we assume that cognition-based trust
building is triggered by appraisal of professional
information that can be usually acquired through a
traditional website. On the other hand, social web
can help to provide a more informal, closer
interaction style between a company or a salesperson
and their customers (e.g., answering to positive and
negative comments on social media platforms).
Therefore, social media may be exploited to enhance
trust building by enforcing the affective route to
persuasion. Previous research mainly focuses on
trust towards traditional websites but does not
include online companies. An investigation of the
potential contribution of social media on affective
trust building would extend the body of knowledge
about trust building in e-commerce.
We hypothesize that being able to monitor a
company’s behavior on social networks could affect
trust building along the benevolence and integrity
dimensions more than traditional websites. In other
words, we argue that traditional websites (content-
oriented) and social media (interaction-oriented)
may have a different effect on trust building in
customer-supplier relationships.
Accordingly, our main hypotheses, the context of
in customer-supplier relationships, are the
followings:
H
aff
– Social media foster affective trust more
than traditional websites.
H
cog
- Traditional websites foster cognitive trust
more than social media.
4 EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN
The study followed a 2 x 2 design (see Table 1). The
Web mode (Traditional Website vs. Social Media) is
the independent variable, while the company
(Company A and Company B) is a blocking factor.
In fact, according to the research question, in this
study we want to investigate the effect of websites
and social media on trust.
Table 1: Study design.
Company A Company B
Traditional Website Group 1 Group 2
Social Media Group 2 Group 1
We recruited 44 participants from the Computer
Science master courses and the undergraduate
degree in Physics (66% male, 24 as average age).
Each subject evaluated the perceived trustworthiness
of both companies, following one of the two
possible combinations reported in Table 1. In
addition, for each group the order of web mode
visualization was also randomized and equally
distributed among subjects, to avoid any bias due to
the sequence of information presentation.
Trust is evaluated by measuring the perceived
trustworthiness of the company, according to three
antecedents: ability, predictability, and benevolence.
Consistently with literature on trust building based
on first impression (Schumann et al. 2012), we do
not assess the company’s integrity because integrity
is peculiar of long-term relationships. In our study,
instead, the subjects did not know the companies
before and it could be impossible for them to guess a
company’s integrity based on the analysis of the
website or the fan page.
The evaluation along the three dimensions is
mapped into the broader concept of affective and
cognitive trust using both questionnaires and
interviews. For each trust antecedent, a set of
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questions was defined, by integrating guidelines and
items included in questionnaires from studies about
trust elicitation and perception based on first
impression (Büttner and Göritz, 2008; Rusman,
2011; Rusman et al. 2010). In our questionnaire
(Calefato et al., 2013), we included 21 questions
overall: 7 for ability and 3 for predictability
(cognitive trust); 11 for benevolence (affective
trust). The subjects were requested to evaluate the
perceived trustworthiness of a given company by
filling out the questionnaire based on Likert scale
from 1 to 5.
According to previous research (Mayer, 1995), it
is reasonable to assume that trust building might be
influenced by personal propensity to trust. In our
scenario, two factors may play a role in the
individual propensity to trust, that is, their
familiarity with Facebook and e-commerce,
respectively. To avoid any bias, we treat these two
variables as covariates. Therefore, subjects were
requested to indicate, on a 4-point Likert scale, how
often they use Facebook and make online purchases.
4.1 Procedure
The experiment took place in two rounds, in a
controlled environment, involving half of the
subjects in the lab at the same time. An experimenter
performed an introduction to the subjects, by
illustrating the scenario and providing detailed
instructions on the procedure for task execution. The
experimenter remained in the room to ensure that the
participants could not interact nor exchange opinions
about the two companies and to answer subjects’
questions during the experiment. Each subject
worked independently and accessed the
experimental procedure through the web.
At the beginning of the experiment, the subjects
answered a short questionnaire aimed at assessing
how familiar they are with web technologies, social
networking and e-commerce in order to assess their
actual propensity to evaluate trustworthiness of
companies based on their web presence. Then, the
subjects learned about the experimental task, related
to the choice of one company for a catering service.
The scenario of the catering was selected to mitigate
the high propensity to risk taking behavior that could
derive from the perception of a low inherent risk
associated to the food and restaurant retail class.
Hence, rather than asking where they would have
lunch, we requested subjects to express their
preference with respect to a purchase involving a
considerable amount of money and having also
social implications (i.e., offering a buffet is
associated also to self-image in social context).
Once the scenario was presented, participants
were requested to visualize and rate two company
profiles (either the company’s website or its
Facebook profile), according to the random
presentation order described before. Subjects were
explicitly requested to explore the company profile
no longer than 5 minutes. As a consequence, each of
the two phases lasted at most 15 minutes, including
both the visualization of the webpage of the
company and answering the questionnaire for the
trustworthiness evaluation. A pre-condition for the
participation was that the subject did not know any
of the two companies and had never browsed any of
the two company websites.
At the end of the experiment, a second
questionnaire based on self-report was provided to
verify the subjects’ preference between the two
companies with respect to the catering scenario as
well as the motivation for their choice. Moreover, at
the end of the web-based part of the experiment, an
experimenter interviewed the participants to clarify
the reasons for the preference towards one of the two
companies as expressed in the questionnaires. The
subjects provided their opinions and perceptions
about the role of both traditional websites and social
media in web marketing. These informal,
unstructured interviews gave us a better insight on
which characteristics of both web modes affect the
trust building along the affective and cognitive
dimensions.
5 RESULTS
5.1 Analysis of the Questionnaires
Figure 1 summarizes the answers provided by the
subjects to the question related to cognitive and
affective trust, grouped according to the web
condition. We observe that, on average, the level of
the perceived cognitive trust (mean = 3.8) stays
unvaried in the two experimental settings. As for the
traditional website condition, we observe that on
average the level of perceived cognitive trusts is
slightly higher than the level of affective trust (3.53).
With respect to social media condition, subjects
perceived almost the same level of cognitive and
affective trust (3.8 vs. 3.79, respectively) due to the
increased perception of trustworthiness along the
affective dimension.
On a 4-point Likert scale, all the participants
except for three were Facebook users on a daily
basis (mean = 3.41, std = 1.01). Besides, they
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declared to have quite different habits regarding the
use of the Internet for their purchases (mean = 1.82,
std = .75). In particular, subjects with a background
in computer science declared they often make
purchases on the Web (mean = 2.58) in contrast with
students with background in Physics who declared to
be not as familiar with e-commerce (1.07). As a
consequence, while subjects’ present a quite
homogeneous familiarity with the Web and
Facebook, they appear to be not equally familiar
with the appraisal mechanism to assess a company
trustworthiness based on its online image, which is
necessary when buying on the Internet. Therefore, to
test our hypotheses, we performed an analysis of
covariance (ANCOVA) on the two dependent
variables, i.e., the levels of cognitive and affective
trustworthiness of companies, as perceived by
subjects. The SME is treated as a blocking factor
while the use of Facebook and frequency of online
purchases are the covariates. The ANCOVA, in fact,
increases the statistical validity of the analysis of
variance by adjusting differences due to existing
factors. In our case, the propensity to trust,
expressed in terms of familiarity with social media
and e-commerce, may determine initial differences
that are not due to the independent variable of our
study design (i.e., the web condition).
Results are reported in Table 2, with statistically
significant values in bold italic (α = .05). The test
shows that propensity to trust does not have any
significant correlation with the established level of
initial trust (neither affective nor cognitive). On the
contrary, we observe a significant effect of the Web
mode on affective trust (F = 7.263, p = .009), but not
on cognitive trust (F = .003, p = .954). The test also
revealed that the role of the Company as a blocking
factor is negligible.
Figure 1: Levels of Perceived Trust, Grouped by
Experimental Condition (Traditional Website Vs. Social
Media).
5.2 Analysis of Self-report
Questionnaires and Interviews
5.2.1 The Impact of Social Media on
Affective Trust
When explicitly requested to state which company
they perceived as more interested in the customers’
needs and preferences (“Which company seems to be
more concerned about the wellbeing and needs of its
customers? Why?”), 61% of subjects expressed in
favor of the company for which they examined the
Facebook page. The analysis of variance, performed
on the data collected through the final questionnaire
based on self-report, confirms a statistically
significant correlation between the social media
condition and the company indicated as more
benevolent and concerned about its customers’
wellbeing and satisfaction (F = 15.53 p = .000). The
subjects interpreted as signs of benevolence the
company intention to share professional knowledge
(i.e., through cooking courses open to customers),
the daily updates of the fanpage with pictures and
news, and the public exposure to customers’
feedback and personalization requests.
5.2.2 Impact of Social Media Impacts on
Cognitive Trust
When reporting about the perceived competence and
predictability of a company (“Which company do
you perceive as the more reliable? Why?”, Which
company seems more competent to you? Why?”),
45% of the participants refer to information elements
that are peculiar of social media.
In particular, they declared to have been
positively impressed by direct exposure to
customers’ feedback and the high frequency of the
updates on the Facebook page with pictures about
food and staff. Yet, according to the analysis of
variance described in the previous section, no
statistical significance is observed for the
relationship between web mode and cognitive trust.
5.2.3 Personal Preference Vs. Perceived
Trustworthiness
We observed an unexpected behavior of subjects
when explicitly requested to state which company
they would select for their meal and which one for
the catering scenario. This discrepancy occurred in
70% of cases (31 over 44 subjects). In three cases,
the subjects motivated this discrepancy stating that
they felt to not have enough information to put their
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complete trust in one of the two companies for the
catering task, even if they expressed a preference for
their own meal. In three cases, subjects indicated the
company they perceived as more reliable as suitable
for the catering service; instead, they choose the
restaurant with the warmer and friendlier
atmosphere, as perceived from the pictures on the
social media, for their meal. In the remaining of
cases (43%), subjects chose for the catering the
company they perceived as more competent and
reliable, as reported in their answers, which not
necessarily corresponds to the one meeting their
personal preferences about food. In general, in all
these cases, the subjects explicitly declared they
evaluated the benevolence of the company based on
the pictures of the staff and the positive
‘atmosphere’ conveyed by the social media.
Table 2: Analysis of covariance and effect of the web
mode on affective trust.
Dependent
Variable
(TRUST)
F p
Use of
Facebook
Cognitive
0 0,991
Affective
0,345 0,558
Frequency of
Online Purchase
Cognitive
0,863 0,356
Affective
0 0,982
Web Mode
Cognitive
0,003 0,954
Affective
7,263 0,009
Company
Cognitive
1,52 0,221
Affective
0,287 0,594
Web Mode *
Company
Cognitive
0,982 0,325
Affective
2,797 0,098
5.2.4 The Importance of Accessing Multiple
Sources of Information
In the final interview with one of the experimenters
and in the last item of the self-report questionnaire,
subjects were left free to express their impression
and general comments about the experiment. Four
subjects declared that they either did not express any
preference with respect to the catering scenario or
struggled in finding an answer. They justified their
lack of trust by claiming that having both websites
and social media available for both companies
would have been the best option in such a critical
context. The discussion that originated from this
claim helped us to identify a recurring schema
adopted by the subjects for gathering information
about unknown companies. This approach involves
gathering professional information from the
traditional website and impression of the
benevolence and availability towards customers
through the community on social media. In
particular, this kind of participants tend to first
search for customers’ feedback on social media;
then, in case of satisfying and positive comments,
they visit the website to access more business related
information, such as prices, delivery times, location
of the store, and contact information.
6 DISCUSSION
We tested two hypotheses, namely H
aff
(social media
foster affective trust more than as traditional
websites) and H
cog
(traditional websites foster
cognitive trust more than social media). As for the
first hypothesis H
aff
, the findings from the
experiment show that social media have an impact
on affective trust in a first impression setting. Being
able to access the company information through a
Facebook fan page provides the possibility to
evaluate information that that trigger affective
appraisal. In particular, the subjects involved in this
experiment had the occasion for assessing the
perceived vendors’ benevolence, that is, their open
and positive disposition towards the customers’
needs and satisfaction, which is consistent with our
assumption of social media reflecting interpersonal
dynamics such as peer-to-peer relationships and
word-of-mouth (Blanchard, 2011). This result is
confirmed by the analysis of the answers to the self-
report questionnaire, where subjects indicated as
more benevolent the company in the social media
condition. Moreover, this is consistent with the
findings of previous research on trust building based
on first impression (Schumann et al., 2012).
Conversely, our findings did not support the
second hypothesis H
cog
that websites foster cognitive
trust more than social media. Instead, from the
analysis of questionnaires and follow-up interviews,
we observed that social media might foster trust
growth also along the cognitive dimension. As
declared by the subjects involved in the experiment,
companies directly exposing themselves to
customers’ feedback and personalization requests on
social media are more credible and self-confident
about the higher quality of goods and services they
provide. Moreover, 45% of subjects reported that
they perceived as more competent and reliable the
company for which a wide range of pictures was
available about staff and products, which is peculiar
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of the social media condition. This is consistent with
literature on the relationship between online photos
and trust (Fogg, 2002; Olson et al., 2002;
Riegelsberger et al., 2003; Steinbrueck et al., 2002).
No statistical significance is observed about the
impact of social media on cognitive trust. Still, it is
interesting to observe how these subjects explicitly
associate the company presence on social media per
se to the perception of its ability and predictability.
In other words, being exposed to customers’
feedback on social networks is perceived as an
implicit statement of quality in the goods and
services provided by a company. In particular, the
direct involvement of the owner in the social media
management is perceived as a cue of his ability in
managing the company business. These findings are
consistent with the results of the study by Schumann
et al. (2012), highlighting how the access to
information elements associated to the affective
dimension may enhance also cognitive trust.
We also observed that some of the participants
explicitly declared to have troubles in choosing
among the two companies, with respect to the
catering scenario and complained that it would have
been necessary for them to have access to both the
website and the Facebook page in order to form a
valid opinion about the SME’s trustworthiness. For
these subjects, social media constitute a source of
information used for a preliminary assessment of the
trustworthiness of an unknown company. Further
details are investigated using traditional websites
only in case of perceived friendliness and attention
to the customers’ needs or in case of explicit positive
feedback of the community. This is consistent with
the findings of the study by de Ruyter et al. (2001)
about the role of affective commitment in the trust
building process.
Another interesting behavior was observed, that
is the discrepancy between the company chosen for
the catering task and the one selected for an informal
and occasional meal, occurring in the 70% of cases.
As far as the catering scenario is concerned, subjects
tended to prefer the company perceived as the more
competent and reliable, regardless of the web
condition. On the contrary, most subjects declared
they would have a meal at the company that either
matches their personal preferences about food or is
perceived as more friendly and open to welcome
customers in an informal atmosphere. They associate
this benevolent attitude to the frequent update of
food and staff pictures, mainly on the social
networks. This is consistent with previous research
on the perception of risk and deliberation in choice
of the retailer (Büttner et al., 2006), demonstrating
how the perceived trustworthiness depend also on
the perceived risk of a purchase. In fact, according to
research on persuasion (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986),
when the perceived risk is high (as for the catering
scenario), people process more content-related
features of a website, while they prefer more
peripheral cues, such as pictures, if the perceived
risk is lower (as for the situation of a lunch with a
friend).
As far as validity is concerned, the current study
presents some limitations. Most participants
involved were people declaring a high level of
familiarity with web technologies and social media,
also due to their age (average 24). Moreover, the
study described in this paper was performed with a
limited pool of 44 participants and most of them are
male (66%). To generalize and validate the findings
of this on-going research, it would be useful to
repeat the study with a larger number of subjects.
Moreover, it could be of great importance to
involve, in future replications, people with more
varied background and age, as well as to balance the
gender distribution, to test the role of these factors
on the propensity to trust in web-based scenarios.
7 CONCLUSIONS
We have studied the role of social media in the
process of trust building in the scenario of a small
company that wants to improve its online presence
and build a trustworthy online image of its brand.
With respect to first impression, we found that social
media foster affective trust more than traditional
websites, by enhancing the perception of a vendor’s
benevolence and openness towards the consumers.
These findings suggest that companies would benefit
from investing their time in establishing enjoyable
‘peer-to-peer’ relationships with their customers.
As a future work, we plan to repeat the study
involving people with different background, age and
level of familiarity with the Internet, in order to test
the role of these factors on the propensity to trust in
web-based scenarios. Furthermore, since this study
is based on a relatively low risk retail category, it
could be useful to compare these results with
analogous studies in other retail categories, such as
pharmacy or expensive technology, where the
customer’s tendency to trust is reduced by the higher
perceived inherent risk of the purchase.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work fulfils the research objectives of the PON
02_00563_3470993 project "VINCENTE - A
Virtual collective INtelligenCe ENvironment to
develop sustainable Technology Entrepreneurship
ecosystems" funded by the Italian Ministry of
University and Research (MIUR).
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