Measuring Online Trust of Websites: Credibility, Perceived Ease of Use, and Risk

As the use of the web for ecommerce and information access continues to expand, user trust of websites has come under inspection. Empirical study of online trust is constrained by the shortage of high-quality measures of general online trust. The development of such measures is a priority for MIS researchers. This paper presents a new instrument for use in studying trust of an individual in a given website. The instrument was tested with two different websites in an experiment conducted in a controlled setting. The items in the instrument were analyzed using a confirmatory factor analysis with a split-sample approach. This process resulted in an instrument of high reliability whose components are unidimensional and whose constructs show high convergent and discriminant validity.

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