Break the Trust Threshold: Customer Ratings and Trust Building on eBay Auctions

Trust in the context of online auctions is an understudied research area with significant implications. In this paper, using longitudinal process view of trust and trustworthiness development, we empirically demonstrate that trustworthiness thresholds do exist in the context of online auctions. Further, our findings suggest that considering the context in which trustworthiness is assessed is important; different thresholds exist for highand low-risk contexts. It takes longer for vendors of high-risk products to reach the trustworthiness threshold than it does for vendors of low-risk products. Our research confirms that trust and trustworthiness are not static phenomena, but rather are complex phenomena that emerge over time.