Research project The Study of Two Roles Trust Mechanisms in Social Commerce
What happens when your friend also becomes your customer? Today, social media often serves as a platform for business activities. This project explores how trust is built, and how it impacts social and commercial behaviour.
More and more individual users use social media platforms for direct business activities. This social commerce model, inter-individuals’ transaction, is developing rapidly. It is also facing big challenges.
When a friend becomes a seller, the seller and the buyer have dual roles simultaneously: “friend + consumer” and “friend + seller”. Based on role theory, this study explores how users build two types of trust towards a friend role and a seller role, and how trust inherit in the two roles impacts the consequent social and commercial behaviour.
The antecedents of trust in the two roles are studied from the perspectives of Guanxi and Ubiquitous Information System attributes. This project conducts a longitudinal study of the dynamic mechanism of trust in the two roles in multi-stage cases; the information overload and role press caused by the two roles are explored as moderating factors. Eventually, an integrated two roles trust model is developed and tested by multiple empirical methods, like scenario-based lab experiments, questionnaire surveys and case studies.
The project contributes with theoretical extensions to research on e-commerce and social commerce. It especially improves our understanding of the role of trust in consumers’ use of social media for business activities.
Project members
Project managers
Shengnan Han
Professor
