A AHP Methodology for Ranking the Factors Influencing Trust in the Internet

Abstract

In the present study, a number of Iranian IT professionals and electronic commerce managers are surveyed in order to investigate their viewpoints about the level of importance for determinant factors affecting the generation of trust among the Internet consumers. To accomplish this, a model, which is adopted from the existing models in the e-trust literature, is offered to represent the crucial factors and variables that influence the creation of trust in an e-commerce setting; then these factors and their components are weighted and rated by using Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) technique. At the end, based on the results of the analysis of data gathered by interviewing with IT and e-commerce experts and managers, the ranking of influential factors on building e-trust in terms of their level of importance includes: technological factors; institutional trust factors; information quality; transaction quality; consumers’ characteristics; and company competency.