The Effect of Website Quality on Information Disclosure: A Cue Utilization Theory Perspective

As shopping through e-commerce portals continues to grow, personal information disclosure is becoming more commonplace. The proposed research employs Cue Utilization Theory (CUT) to better understand how extrinsic cues, intrinsic cues, or a combination of both, influence truthful consumer disclosure of personal demographic information. The two relevant cues used in the study are security features (website seals and security statements) and website visual appeal (VAP). Two studies, a lab experiment and a field study utilizing a snowball sample, will expose subjects to mock-up ecommerce sites that vary high and low components of the cues and present a shopping simulation to determine the cues’ influence on truthful disclosure decisions. We posit that VAP will drive stronger predictive and critical values than security features, thereby having greater impact on truthful disclosure. Results from these two studies will be presented at the conference. Contributions and limitations of the proposed research are discussed.