The Impact of Third-Party Information on Trust: Valence, Source, and Reliability.

ABSTRACT: Economic exchange between strangers happens extremely frequently due to the growing number of internet transactions. In trust situations like online transactions, a trustor usually does not know whether she encounters a trustworthy trustee. However, the trustor might form beliefs about the trustee's trustworthiness by relying on third-party information. Different kinds of third-party information can vary dramatically in their importance to the trustor. We ran a factorial design to study how the different characteristics of third-party information affect the trustor's decision to trust. We systematically varied unregulated third-party information regarding the source (friend or a stranger), the reliability (gossip or experiences), and the valence (positive or negative) of the information. T

SUBMITTER: Bozoyan C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4755612 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature