| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中央大學 === 資訊管理研究所 === 95 === Due to the lack of branding equity, building consumer trust has been one major challenge for newly established online retailers. Prior studies have shown that security logo and privacy policy as the effective signals to assure consumer trust of the online retailers. Building upon the signaling theory and information richness perspective, this study proposed three new signals, namely e-scape, Media richness and personal information source. Specifically, this paper examined the following three issues. First, do the three signals increase consumers’ trust of the online retailers? Second, whether the presence of two different categories of signals project stronger effects on trust than one single signal? Third, does the characteristics (searching vs. experience) of the product moderate the effects of trust signals? Two experiments were conducted to examine these issues. The 1st experiment examined the effects of e-scape and the moderating effects of product characteristics, while the 2nd experiement examined the main effects of media richness and personal information, the moderating effects of product characteristics, and the influences of double signals. The results in general support the main effects of the three trust signals. Product characteristics only moderat the influences of media richness on trust, while projecting two signals may not result in higher trust while the single signal projected is media richness.
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