온라인 오픈마켓에서 신뢰와 가격 프리미엄의 관계

The role of trust in online open marketplace is more important than that in Internet shopping malls because the risk resulting from opportunistic actions is high. Trust in Internet shopping is classified into seller trust and institution-based trust(e.g. third-party escrows, feedback mechanism, real name systems and three strikes out) which is called web site trust. Institution-based trust can be transferred to seller trust. Especially feedback mechanisms act as reputation systems, informing buyers about a seller's reputation and creating price premiums for trustworthy sellers returns to their reputation. Prices are as important as confidence in the online open marketplace. Lower price than Internet shopping malls provides consumers with motivation of purchase from open marketplaces. Although many studies on the trust have been conducted, there are only a few works considering together trust and price in electronic commerce. Thus. It is important to conduct the study on the relationship between seller trust and price premium in online open marketplaces. The purpose of this study is to answer the following two research questions based on price premium, buyer's motivation participating into open marketplaces, trust transfer. and price thresholds. How do buyer consider the relationship between trust and price in case of decision making for purchasing in online open marketplace? Does seller trust have ap influence on price premium in online open marketplace? Five hypotheses are derived from the above research questions and are tested. In this paper, we proposed a objective and scientific method for calculating seller trust by employing real data of seller ratings given in online marketplace. The new method is called a seller trust function. Auctiontwww.auction.co.kr) known as the largest and oldest open marketplace in Korea is selected for driving a seller trust function and for testing hypotheses. All sellers of Auction site have seller trust indicators including seller grade. selling satisfaction. and seller rating/product rating. A total of 252 valid samples were collected from questionnaire survey in which buyers of Auction were asked to assess importance of three seller trust indicators and to offer trust levels of each seller trust indicator as shown in Appendix 1. We calculated weights of three seller trust indicators by applying analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to the sample data. To answer the questions. rating information of 167 sellers and price data for 4 product items form Auction site were gathered. To test research hypotheses. correlation analysis and multiple regression technique were used. In this study. we have shown that seller trust is positively associated with price in case (of higher price products while no such correlation exists in case of lower price products. In case of higher price products over 450 US dollars. seller trust had a significant impact on price premium. However. seller trust had no influence on price premium in case of lower price products below 70 US dollars. Hierarchical regression analysis showed that price played a moderating role in the relationship between seller trust and price premium. We found that purchase decision making depends on factors except seller trust and price such as convenience or timeliness in case of lower price products if buyers assure that the open marketplace with good institution-based trust is reliable. By using the real transaction data provided by open marketplace. the paper has theoretical and practical implications fer better understanding the role of seller trust on forming the price premium in online marketplaces.