Quantifying the impact on distrust of e-commerce trust factors: A non-parametric study

Distrust, besides its current use as the antonymous of trust, has also been proposed as a separate and relevant aspect in the adoption of business to consumer e-commerce. This work empirically addresses this issue, analyzing and comparing probabilistic dependencies between consumers´ perceptions of distrust and trust, site characteristics and opinions of respondents about the site or the vendor. Bi-variate mutual information is used to associate not only ordinal data as usually, but also ordinal (opinions) with nominal data (identified characteristics). The latter reveals to be a more effective approach since it allows to discriminate between mixed, pure trust and pure distrust factors. Tri-variate mutual information further identifies synergies through which trust factors might influence distrust. In addition to mutual information, Kendall´s tau correlation identifies weak inverse relations in ordinal information. Focusing on the consumer without previous contact with a certain seller or site, the findings help to explain why trust was viewed as opposed to distrust and why they can instead be considered separate constructs.