전자상거래의 상품 및 채널 특성과 인지된 위험 - 항공 및 여행 산업에 대한 시사점 -

It has been well established that perceived risks associated with online transactions negatively influence transaction intentions of e-commerce users. Research on antecedents of perceived risks has found that seller characteristics (e.g., trust) and buyer characteristics (e.g., internet usage experience) are major antecedents of risk perception. However, the extant literature has a limitation in that it is focused on the determinants of overall perceived risks rather than those of individual risk dimensions such as financial risk and performance risk. Further, the literature has overlooked two significant potential antecedents, product characteristics and channel characteristics. This study intends to fill the gaps by investigating the impacts of two product characteristics factors (price and information intensity) and e-commerce channel type (PC-based vs. mobile) on three critical risk dimensions in e-commerce (financial, performance, and privacy risks). Our web-based experiment results show that the product characteristics factors have differential impacts on perceived risk and that there exists a difference in risk perception between PC-based and mobile channels, which have distinct technical capabilities from each other. Specifically, this study provides the following main results and related implications. First, we find that the price of a product has a positive impact on financial risk while it does not affect performance risk. This result implies that sellers of airline tickets or overseas travels, which are usually high-priced, need to make efforts to reduce the financial risk potential buyers perceive. In particular, those sellers that offer competitive prices are advised to increase price transparency and thereby to alleviate the uncertainty in the monetary costs incurred by buyers. Second, the information intensity of a product is found to increase both performance risk and privacy risk while it has no significant effect on financial risk. Therefore, it would be critical for sellers of goods with high information intensity to address potential buyers’ risk perceptions concerning performance and privacy by enabling efficient information acquisition required for buyers’ purchase decision making. One possible approach applicable to the airline or travel industries would be to enhance omni-channel strategies in which the offline channel is more vigorously exploited as an information channel and is integrated with the online channel. Another approach for the seller of the airline or travel services, which are characterized as experience goods, could be to provide more elaborate customer reviews by quantifying attribute-specific customer ratings and offering content curation of customer reviews. Third, the analysis result shows that the mobile channel is related to a higher level of privacy risk, compared with the PC-based channel. Given that the mobile channel is inherently exposed to higher risk because users may access the channel via various, sometimes public, networks, sellers of airline tickets or travel packages need to capitalize on the framing effect to improve persuasive communications regarding the benefits users could gain in return for providing personal information. In doing so, sellers could limit negative impacts of buyers’ privacy risk in their mobile transactions of the goods.