Effects of Trust Repairing Strategies on Competence Violation

摘要

Trust is an important precondition for the healthy development of e-commerce. But, due to lack of experiences, trust established online is more prone to damage, preventing the further development of e-commerce. It is of great value to know how to effectively repair damaged trust. Competence is an important dimension of trust, and competence violation is a common form of trust violation. Therefore, this research attempts to identify effective strategies to repair competence violation. According to a seller's competence involved in online sales, this research categorizes competence violation into the violation of assurance ability of product quality, communication ability, and supporting ability. Meanwhile, this research identifies affective repairing strategy and functional repairing strategy and proposes that these two strategies will have positive effects on repairing the three types of competence violation. The data is collected via field survey and a total of 324 effective questionnaires are collected. By PLS-based structural equation modelling, this research verifies the proposed research model and indicates that compared with the functional repairing strategy, the affective repairing strategy is more effective at repairing competence violation. The conclusion of this research further enriches the extant theory of trust repairing and provides guidance for sellers to more effectively remedy damaged trust.