| This research investigates whether consumers' affective trust and affective risk feelings influence their intentions to engage in business-to-consumer ecommerce beyond their cognitive trust and cognitive risk beliefs. Ecommerce has introduced trust and risk issues which are highly salient to consumers. Current IS research indicates that website design features can influence cognitive trust and cognitive risk, which in turn influence behavioral intentions. It remains to be examined whether affective trust and affective risk can serve as additional key determinants of consumers' intentions, and how these affective states can be influenced by website design features.;This dissertation based its conceptualization of affective trust on the need-to-belong theory, which emphasizes people's fundamental motivation to form and to maintain social bonds, and their subsequent striving tendency to satisfy this motivation. The articulation of affective risk is based on the risk-as-feelings theory, which emphasizes that people's anticipatory visceral affect will influence their subsequent behavior over and above the influence of their cognitive evaluations. Data were collected through three field studies and one laboratory experiment. The findings supported the convergent and discriminant validities of affective trust and affective risk, and found that affective trust, affective risk and cognitive trust were significant determinants of behavioral intentions. The findings from the laboratory experiment demonstrated that the effect of website design features on behavioral intentions was mediated by affective trust, affective risk and cognitive trust. Cognitive risk was found to influence behavioral intentions through affective risk, which indicates that cognitive evaluations of a risky situation could have affective responses.;This research added affective trust and affective risk, two constructs largely ignored by IS researchers, into the nomological network of trust and risk, and developed two measurement scales for affective trust and affective risk, respectively. This study also explained more variance in behavioral intentions than most of the previous IS studies which only incorporated either cognitive trust or cognitive risk or both as predictors. The findings suggest that practitioners could adopt design features such as sincere messages, product demonstrations, return policies, seals of approval or package tracking functions to enhance the effectiveness of their ecommerce strategies. |
