Trust Based E-Commerce Decisions

introduction Over the years, trust has been extensively studied in many fields such as sociology, psychology, and economics. The sociologist Gambetta (2000) states that trust is one of the most important social concepts present in all human interaction and without it there is no cooperation or society. Berscheid (1994) also claims that trust is central to how we interact with each other; thus, it is a key to the positive interrelationships. Social psychologists use the notion of trust to predict acceptance of behaviors by others and institutions (e.g., government agencies). In literature, trust is defined in so many ways that it becomes more elusive than the physical dimensions of space and time. In time, due to the increase of human-computer interaction, trust has become one of the most challenging topics in computer science. Similar to the definitions of trust defined by sociologists and psychologists, computer scientists have also defined trust in their own way (McKnight & How much we trust the source, information, or agent has become one of the hardest questions to answer. As computer technology advances, the need for trust between multiple parties in a communication-based systems increase. The Internet is one of the best examples of the applications that trust needs to be investigated in depth. Although, it was conceived as a military and academic project, over the years, the number of non-academics users, has increased, gaining popularity among the business community. With the introduction of the World Wide Web (WWW) (Berber-Lee & Cailliau, 1994), the Internet has become a collaborative medium that allows people anywhere in the world to add and retrieve information. Today, Internet services are increasingly being used in business to consumer (B2C) e-commerce applications (Liao & Cheung, 2001). E-commerce provides a new way of shopping for the customers by offering more choices and transforming economic activity into a digital media. It also provides an opportunity for the businesses to extend their sales to a larger community. However, the success of getting higher profits and improved services are based on better communication. As in the real world, critical understanding of users' behavior in cyberspace cannot be achieved without the analysis of the factors affecting the purchase decisions (Limayem, Khalifa & Frini, 2000). Having lots of options in an environment that is missing face-to-face interaction enforce users to make trust-aware decisions to better protect their privacy and satisfy their expectations such as quality of services.