Impact of consumer empowerment on online trust: An examination across genders

a r t i c l e i n f o Consumer empowerment is a psychological construct related to the individual's perception of the extent to which he/she can control the distribution and use of his/her personally identifying information. It has been argued to have an impact on consumers' privacy concerns and trust in e-commerce. However, very little is known about the difference in male and female perceptions of this control. This investigation is focused on examining how perceptions between the genders differ concerning consumer empowerment and privacy concerns, and how the consumer empowerment results in perceptions of trust and decrease in privacy concerns. We test our proposed hypotheses using data collected from 322 experienced online consumers. Our results show that empowerment has a stronger positive effect on trust for males than for females, and that privacy concerns have stronger negative impact on trust for females than for males. While e-commerce has grown substantially over the last decade, it still is marred with the lack of trust and growing privacy concerns. Various researchers have suggested empowering the consumers in order to alleviate their privacy concerns and to build their trust in e-commerce. For example, Van Dyke et al. [88] showed that consumers with higher levels of perceived privacy empowerment exhibited lower level of privacy concerns. Olivero and Lunt [62] suggested that when faced with an increase in awareness of privacy threats, consumers tend to reduce trust and demand more control. This suggests that firms which empower consumers by delegating control may be able to gain a competitive advantage. The psychology literature suggests that empowerment is viewed differently by males and females [41,75]. The question then arises: Do males and females differ in their evaluations of interplays among online trust, privacy concerns, and consumer privacy empower-ment? Answering this question will help practitioners and academics to understand how to empower consumers to establish their trust. To this end, we develop a model based on social constructionist theory of gender characterization, and hypothesize that the effects of privacy concerns and privacy empowerment on trust differs across genders. Using a large sample, we ask the following research questions: RQ1: Is the effect of consumer privacy empowerment on online privacy concerns different across genders? RQ2: Is the effect of consumer privacy empowerment on online trust different across genders? RQ3: Is the effect of consumers' privacy concerns on online trust different across genders? This research topic …