An Empirical Investigation Of Antecedents And Consequences Of Consumer Trust For Travelling Apps

This dissertation was an effort to fill the gap of investigating the antecedents and consequences of trust in online buying.Previously,only counted studies have explored this consumer trust with its dimensions in online context.Researchers(Mcknight et al.,2002)proposed benevolence,competence and integrity as dimensions of trust in online perspective.This study is unique for investigating the firm and individual characteristics parallel as antecedent of consumer trust.Firm characteristics has further measured with perceived credibility and perceived reputation whereas individual values have been observed with Schwartz four high order values.These values are openness to change,conservation,self-enhancement and self-transcendence.Loyalty and customer citizenship behavior have discussed as consequences of consumer trust.Furthermore,loyalty has observed with two dimensions i.e.attitudinal and behavioral loyalty.Positive emotions of customers were also considered as moderator.Data were collected from Beijing,China.Respondents were regular user of online travelling apps/website(“12306"and"?????”).Actual collected back questionnaires were 448.Data was initially entered in SPSS.All descriptive and few of preliminary analyses were performed in SPSS.Hypotheses were tested in AMOS through Structural equation modeling technique(SEM).Before applying SEM normality,reliability(standardized,unstandardized,composite)and validity(construct,convergent and discriminant)analyses were performed.Most of the hypotheses of the study have accepted.In exclusive research models,rejection of few hypotheses has quite acceptable by the researchers.Few of the rejected hypotheses were belonged to the two individual values,which is quite acceptable.Reason being Schwartz four high order values are opposite to each other.Like two values have are opposite of other two values i.e.openness to change and conservation are opposite to each other and self-enhancement and self-transcendence are opposite to each other.Findings of this dissertation accepted hypotheses of two individual values(openness to change and Self-transcendence).These findings are aligning with previous online study of Schwartz values(Hansen,2008).Trust has examined with three dimensions(benevolence,competence and integrity),out of these three hypotheses related to two dimensions(benevolence and integrity)has accepted.Hence,loyalty and customer citizenship behavior has accepted the impact of these two dimensions(benevolence and integrity).In addition to this,customer positive emotions also moderated the relationships positively and negatively.This study also contributed a scant amount of literature theoretically and practically.Theoretically,this dissertation filled the gap by examining the impact Schwartz individual cultural values(openness to change,conservation,self-enhancement and self-transcendence)on consumer trust.Previously,Devos et al.,(2002)endorsed this relationship but they examined in an organization for employees.This is the first study which examined the impact of these values for consumers on trust in online buying context.Secondly,only counted research studies have observed consumer trust in online context(Mcknight et al.,2002;Palvia,2009).This is the strength of this study to observe the consumer trust will its dimensions.These are benevolence,competence and integrity.Third,this is first study,which observed trust dimension(benevolence,competence and integrity)impact on retaining variables like loyalty and customer citizenship behavior.Besides theoretical contribution,this study also added a scant amount of literature for marketing practitioners.Practical contributions have discussed under the head of build credibility;focus on reputation,individual's characteristics,and consumer trust and customer retention.