Transition of electronic word-of-mouth services from web to mobile context: A trust transfer perspective

a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Mobile services eWOM Trust transfer Web-mobile service transition Entitativity Technology acceptance Success in web services cannot promise the success in corresponding mobile services. To understand the mobile service adoption behavior under the context of web–mobile service transition, this study, taking mobile eWOM services as an example, investigates the role of trust in mobile service adoption and empirically examines the trust transfer mechanism. Specifically, trust in web services and two relationship-relevant factors namely functional consistency and perceived entitativity are proposed as the predictors of trust in mobile services. A field survey with 235 mobile eWOM services users is conducted to test the research model and hypotheses. The key findings include (1) trust in mobile services positively influences intention to use mobile services; (2) trust in web services, functional consistency and perceived entitativity positively influence trust in mobile services; (3) functional consistency positively influences perceived entitativity. Limitations, theoretical and practical implications are also discussed. The proliferation of mobile devices and the advancement in wireless network has created an " always-on " society or " ubiquitous society, " where mobile services have penetrated to every corner of today's life. Various mobile services including mobile commerce services (e.g., [40]), mobile banking services (e.g., [15]), mobile health services (e.g., [56]), mobile instant messaging (e.g., [10]) and mobile entertainment services (e.g., [16]) have greatly changed people's way to shop, to work, and even to live. Despite the practical importance of mobile services, the theoretical understanding and empirical investigations on users' mobile service adoption behavior are still far from adequate. In this study, to enrich prior literature on mobile services, we pay special attention to one type of mobile services which are rarely explored in previous studies namely mobile electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) services. eWOM services are originally developed in the web context where it provides online consumers a platform to share their shopping experience through online communications [14,19]. In the recent years, eWOM service providers have started to expand the eWOM services into the mobile context to better leverage the advantage of ubiquitous computing such as ubiquity, mobility, localization and personalization and enable the real-time and interactive services [20]. However, the success in web services cannot promise the success in mobile services because there are several problems which will be generated in the service transition process. First, compared to the PC-and broadband-based web services, in …