The Conceptualization of Trust, Risk and Their Relationship in Electronic Commerce: The Need for Clarifications

In recent years, significant advances have been made in the understanding of trust and risk in electronic commerce. However, in examining the published research, some troublesome trends surface. These trends include (a) the tendency to treat conceptualizations of trust and risk as unidimensional constructs, ignoring the large body of literature suggesting that they are complex, multidimensional constructs, (b) the tendency to ignore whether trustworthiness is part of trust or a possibly different construct, and. (c) the tendency to articulate relationships between trust and risk idiosyncratically without attention to prior articulations. These trends are troublesome because they have the potential to hamper the field’s ability to do cumulative research in the long run. The goal of this article is to highlight these trends and call for greater attention to the issues raised in future research.