Transition of electronic word-of-mouth services from web to mobile context: A trust transfer perspective☆
Highlights
► Trust in web services can be transferred to the corresponding mobile services. ► Functional consistency and perceived entitativity affect trust in mobile services. ► Functional consistency influences perceived entitativity.
Introduction
The proliferation of mobile devices and the advancement in wireless network has created an “always-on” society or “ubiquitous society,” where mobile services have penetrated to every corner of today's life. Various mobile services including mobile commerce services (e.g., [40]), mobile banking services (e.g., [15]), mobile health services (e.g., [56]), mobile instant messaging (e.g., [10]) and mobile entertainment services (e.g., [16]) have greatly changed people's way to shop, to work, and even to live. Despite the practical importance of mobile services, the theoretical understanding and empirical investigations on users’ mobile service adoption behavior are still far from adequate.
In this study, to enrich prior literature on mobile services, we pay special attention to one type of mobile services which are rarely explored in previous studies namely mobile electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) services. eWOM services are originally developed in the web context where it provides online consumers a platform to share their shopping experience through online communications [14], [19]. In the recent years, eWOM service providers have started to expand the eWOM services into the mobile context to better leverage the advantage of ubiquitous computing such as ubiquity, mobility, localization and personalization and enable the real-time and interactive services [20].
However, the success in web services cannot promise the success in mobile services because there are several problems which will be generated in the service transition process. First, compared to the PC- and broadband-based web services, in the mobile context, the screen is smaller and the processing capability is relatively low. Further, the wireless network may be not so stable as broadband. This may make mobile eWOM services not be able to work well, raising users’ concerns about its competence to provide quality services. Second, since context-sensitive information will be used in the mobile service delivery process, users may suffer a risk of privacy invasion [57]. Further, as eWOM services engage in providing users with consumption recommendations, users may be confused about whether the information provided is really according to their personal needs or just commercial advertisements, raising users’ concerns about the benevolence and integrity of service providers. Therefore, trust becomes a critical issue relevant to users’ mobile eWOM service adoption behavior.
Previous literature on trust has proposed several underlying mechanisms to explain the trust building process including institution-based mechanism, knowledge-based mechanism and trust transfer mechanism [39]. However, to understand which mechanism works better requires further considerations on the research context. The unique feature of our research context is that the mobile services are not suddenly developed in the mobile context but transited from the initial web services. In this situation, the linkage between the initial web services and the newly emerged mobile services may play an important role in the trust building process. Therefore, we propose to view the adoption of this type of mobile services from a trust transfer perspective. Specifically, we figure out three categories of factors to understand the trust transfer process: trust in source, trust in target and the relationships between source and target, and propose that the trust in source and the relationships between source and target can influence the trust in target. Further, two factors namely functional consistency and perceived entitativity are proposed to capture the relationships between source and target according to the research context of web–mobile service transition.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In the next section, previous literature on mobile services and the trust transfer theory are reviewed. Then, the research model is proposed and the hypotheses are developed. Consequently, the survey procedure is demonstrated and the data analysis results are reported. Finally, the key findings of the study and the theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Section snippets
Web–mobile service transition
Advance in wireless technology and mobile devices have given rise to the booming of mobile services. With the extensive coverage of wireless network (e.g., WiFi hotspots), the improvement of communication protocol (e.g., wireless application protocol and global positioning system), and the upgrade of mobile devices (e.g., high processing capability of Smartphone and large and touch-screen), mobile services have become a necessary and important component of today's life.
Mobile services can be
Research model and hypotheses
We propose our research model in Fig. 1. In the model, trust in mobile eWOM services is regarded as an important predictor of users’ behavioral intention to use mobile eWOM services. Further, trust in mobile eWOM services is influenced by the initial trust in web eWOM services and two factors capturing the relationships between the source and target of trust transfer namely functional consistency and perceived entitativity. We also include perceived value of mobile eWOM services as a control
Research settings
A famous Chinese eWOM website Dianping.com was selected as the research site. Initiated in 2003, Dianping.com provides users a platform to post their ratings and reviews on restaurant and other entertainment services and help other users to make decision on the consumption of these services. According to the statistics in March 2011, Dianping.com has more than 30 million active users and the reviews cover 1 million vendors across 2,000 Chinese cities. To extend their service scope, Dianping.com
Data analysis
Partial Least Squares (PLS) Graph 3.00 was used to analyze the data and examine the hypotheses. As a second-generation multivariate technique, PLS could simultaneously assess the measurement model and the structural model. Compared to the covariance-based structural equation modeling (SEM), PLS requires a relatively small sample size, has no restriction on normal distribution, and is more appropriate for exploratory analysis and for handling formative constructs [6]. Thus, PLS is more suitable
Post-hoc analysis
Several post-hoc analysis was conducted to enrich our understanding on the results. First, there may be interaction effects between the initial trust in web eWOM services, functional consistency and perceived entitativity, because when the initial trust in web eWOM services is low, the impacts of functional consistency and perceived entitativity on trust in mobile eWOM services may be negative rather than positive. To test this possibility, we included these interaction effects into the model
Conclusion
The web–mobile service transition has become a trend of business extension for web service providers. However, theories and empirical studies to examine this transition are lacked. To fill this research gap, this study drawing upon the trust transfer theory to explain the initial trust building mechanisms of mobile services. Specifically, users’ initial trust in web service and their perceptions about the functional consistency and perceived entitativity have been found to determine the mobile
Acknowledgement
The work described in this paper was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71201118), the Key Program from National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.71231007), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Project No. 121055), Self-dependent Research Project for Social and Humanity Science of Wuhan University (Project No. 274130) and Start-up Research Grant for Oversea Talents of Wuhan University (Project No. 273664).
Nan Wang is a Ph. D candidate in the University of Science and Technology of China-City University of Hong Kong Joint Advanced Research Center. Her research interests include e-commerce, knowledge management, and virtual community.
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2023, Journal of Retailing and Consumer ServicesCitation Excerpt :Hence, consumers would evaluate the normality of a social shopping setting to build their security beliefs through comparing the social shopping setting to similar online shopping channels (Pan and Zinkhan, 2006). Transference-based trust refers to the fact that the trustor's trust in the trustee can also be built on their trust in a third party that shares an association with the trustee (Hou et al., 2021; Wang et al., 2013, 2021). The trust transfer process can occur in different ways, including transference from a context to an individual entity (Stewart, 2003; Wang et al., 2021; Zhao et al., 2019).
Nan Wang is a Ph. D candidate in the University of Science and Technology of China-City University of Hong Kong Joint Advanced Research Center. Her research interests include e-commerce, knowledge management, and virtual community.
Xiao-Liang Shen is currently an Associate Professor of the Economics and Management School at Wuhan University, P.R. China. He received his two Ph.D. degrees from City University of Hong Kong and University of Science and Technology of China respectively. His current research interests include IT innovation adoption and diffusion, knowledge management, virtual collaboration, and social media and commerce. He has published in International academic journals and conference proceedings, including Journal of Information Technology, Information Systems Frontier, Online Information Review, and International Conference on Information Systems, etc.
Yongqiang Sun is an Associate Professor of School of Information Management, Wuhan University. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from University of Science and Technology of China. His current research interests include e-commerce, knowledge management, virtual community, and human-computer interactions. His work has appeared in several international journals including Information Systems Research, Journal of the AIS, Decision Support Systems and Computers in Human Behavior and the conferences on information systems including International Conference on Information Systems, Americas Conference on Information Systems, and Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems.
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The authors made equal contributions to the paper.