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No salient
consumer value
condition
Similar salient
consumer value
condition
No attribute
condition
Similar attribute
condition
e
Item 1
e
Store
trustworthiness
e
Trust in
e-commerce
store
Item 2
e
Intention
to buy
Item 3
e
Benevolence
e
Item 4
e
Integrity
e
e
e
Competence
Fig. 2.4
Direct model
Furthermore, there was no statistically significant improvement in overall good-
ness of fit from the indirect to the direct model (
4, n.s.),
and Akaike's information criterion (AIC) is slightly smaller in the indirect model.
This strongly suggests that we should select the indirect model from the viewpoint
of parsimony. These results support H2-1, instead of H2-2, that salient consumer
value similarity has an indirect effect, via trust in e-commerce store, on intention
to buy.
chi-squared
¼
7.1, df
¼
D
2.5 Discussion and Conclusions
In this study, we indicated the limitations of traditional social psychological
approaches in understanding trust building in e-commerce stores and investigated
the effects of external information about salient consumer values and attributes of
previous buyers on trust in potential buyers. We also conducted an exploratory
investigation of the process by which SVS increases intention to buy from an
e-commerce store.
As we predicted in H1, salient consumer value similarity to previous users had a
causal effect on increasing trust in e-commerce stores. By manipulating salient
consumer value similarity, we were able to avoid the ambiguous interpretation
common to correlational survey studies. Specifically, it is not possible to interpret
our findings such that there was a reverse causal relationship in which people trust
e-commerce stores and therefore perceive shared similarities with previous buyers
under a false consensus effect (Ross et al.
1977
). Sharing salient consumer values
with previous buyers does not logically guarantee that a site is trustworthy. Yet our
