Is interpersonal and institutional e-trustworthiness equally important in consumer e-trust development? Implications for consumers' e-trust building behaviours

Trust is a widely studied phenomenon across numerous disciplines. E-trust researchers have conducted a vast number of studies, but despite extensive interest in the issue, there are only few studies that concentrate on how consumers build e-trust. Furthermore, consumer e-trust is seen to be a function of both interpersonal and institutional e-trustworthiness, but only limited number of attempts have been conducted to study the relative importance of interpersonal and institutional e-trustworthiness in consumer e-trust development process. The present article seeks to improve this situation by studying how consumers' perceived interpersonal and institutional e-trustworthiness influence their intention to build e-trust. The results of the study suggest that consumers build e-trust actively, and the development of e-trust is not only based on trustees' behaviour. Moreover, the results indicate that interpersonal e-trustworthiness is more important than institutional e-trustworthiness in consumers' e-trust building.