Consumer's Trust Transfer Research Based On The Transaction Environment

In the process of consumers'direct or indirect interactivity with merchants, consumers'trust in merchants is constantly changing and develops dynamically. And the influence of trading environment plays an important role. Further, owing to the process of potential cognition exists in the formation of trust; when the trading environment changes, it will lead to consumers'trust-transfer procedure, which is aiming at the same merchants between different environments. And at the same time, the third party related to the merchants in the same environment that will influence consumers'trust through intersubjective's trust transfer.The paper mainly studies the influences of trust transfer on the establishment of consumers'initial trust. Firstly, based on the theory of signal transmission and self-efficiency, the study builds a trust transfer model aiming at the same subject between different environments. The model analyzes the trust transfer not only from the offline to the online environment but also from the online to the mobile environment. Utilizing the two-stage data from the same respondents, the model is empirically tested. The comparison of the results shows that when the consumers'perceived change of environment is great, initial trust is built on the established trust in merchants; the established trust can strengthen consumers'positive perception of merchants'trust signal and enhance the establishment of trust. Conversely, prior successful experiences will improve the consumers'perceptions of self-ability, which probably lowers the effect of bank's role on the establishment of initial trust. Therefore, banks should cultivate consumers'perceptions of their relative advantages in the original environment and thus improve the consumers'dependency in the new environment to avoid the loss of consumers and build a long-term relationship.Based on the entitativity, the study analyzes the effect of the related forms between different subjects in the electronic commerce environment on trust transfer. The findings demonstrate that perceived similarity has a significant influence on the three facets of initial trust (ability, benevolence and integrity) and perceived relationship only has a significant influence on the one facet-ability. By comparison with friendly links, the related form of placing advertising banners which is commercial is obviously difficult to form the perceived similarity.Last, from the perspective of recommendation trust, the study analyzes the effect of consumers'reviews on the establishment of initial trust. Based on the definition and measurement of recommendation trust, this study selects consumers'evaluation systems in C2C environment as the research object and analyzes the effect of consumers'whole trust in referrer to the trust transfer to the merchants. The research indicates that perceptions of evaluation quality, evaluation quantity, timeliness, and evaluation quantity including contents have significant influences on initial trust. Simultaneously, there is difference between the influence of positive and negative recommendation trust.