Determinants of escrow service adoption in consumer-to-consumer online auction market: An experimental study

Risk relief services (RRSs), as complementary to online trust promoting services, are becoming versatile options for risk reduction in online consumer-to-consumer auctions. In this paper, we identify factors that affect the behavior of buyers in an online auction market who had to either adopt or not adopt online escrow services (OES). An experimental C2C auction system with embedded decision support features was used to collect data. Results show that market factors, such as fraud rate, product price, and seller's reputation are important in determining buyers' OES adoption. This study also finds that sellers' reputation has a significant effect on buyer's risk perception, which influences his OES adoption decision. Furthermore, the buyers' OES adoption decisions were found to be congruent with the implied recommendations that were based on expected utility calculations. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.