Trust Transfer on the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web (WWW) has been touted as providing great opportunities for small businesses to compete and thrive. Concerns about trust have been identified as a barrier to such businesses' success. This research explores how consumers' initial trust judgments about organizations they encounter on the Web may be influenced by hypertext links from trusted websites and associations with the more trust-inducing traditional retail channel. This paper develops and tests a cognitive model of the trust transfer process, arguing that trust is transferred across hypertext links based on the perceived interaction and similarity of the linked organizations, and that institution-based trust is transferred from the…