Lifting Vendor Loyalty Through Trust: Testing the 'Chutes and Ladders' Metaphor

摘要

Trust in technology is a nascent but growing Information Systems research domain. This paper applies and tests both trust theory and loyalty theory to trust in technology. Researchers show that trust builds loyal relationships over time. Even though trust is a known key loyalty antecedent, few have followed trust's effects on loyalty over time or how trust develops and changes over time. This paper investigates the relationship between trust in technology and loyalty to the technology vendor at time 0 and time 8. Then it tests Lewicki and Bunker's "chutes and ladders" metaphor of trust change, which we apply to trust in technology. We find trust is related to loyalty, but that this relationship changes over time. We also provide empirical evidence consistent with the chutes and ladders theory. We finds trust change occurs more frequently when users are new to a technology versus experienced with it.