Trust and TAM for Online Recommendation Agents

Online product recommendation agents are becoming increasingly available on websites to assist consumers with reducing information overload, provide advice in finding suitable products, and facilitate online consumer decision-making. Central of these services is consumer trust in the agents. In several recent studies, the trust construct has been successfully integrated into the Technology Adoption Model (TAM) for general online shopping environments where the websites are treated as an information technology and the e-vendors are treated as trust objects. This study extends the integrated Trust-TAM model to online recommendation agents. Such agents, unlike websites, are inherently more complex personalized technologies adapted to work on behalf of a principal (user). The relative importance of consumers’ initial trust vis-à-vis other TAM use-antecedents was examined. Results indicate that consumers’ initial trust not only directly influences their intention to adopt the agents but has indirect effect via their enhanced perceived usefulness of the agents.