Antecedents of Trust in Electronic-Service Providers: Results from a Meta-Analysis

Abstract

Consumers' trust beliefs are considered amongst the most important psychological states influencing their online behavior. Understanding the antecedents of consumer trust is thus of both academic and practical interest. Research into these antecedents has however been disconnected, and has not been integrated to provide an answer as to which are the most significant antecedents of trust. To address this problem, we synthesized the antecedents of trust in e-service through a meta-analysis of 67 previously published studies. The findings showed that structural assurance (STA), reputation (REP), perceived usefulness (PU), system quality (SYQ) and service quality (SEQ) demonstrate the strongest effect sizes on trust. Furthermore, vendor size (SIZ) and privacy protection (PRC) also affect trust, but to a lesser degree. Moreover, we found trust can be usefully integrated with constructs from the TAM and IS Success models. We considered explanations for identified heterogeneity in effect sizes through moderator analysis. We found that cultural context of the study almost moderated all the effect sizes, and certain effect sizes were also moderated by factors such as the type of e-service and the use of student samples. Results are important to guiding future e-services research and helping practitioners to better build e-service promotion strategy.