Contextual Influences on Online Trust Formation : Differentiating the E-Commerce and Social Networking Business Models

User trust has been identified as a key success factor for online services. Research has come a long way in identifying antecedents and elements of online trust. Yet trust research is largely focused on the particular context of e-commerce services. Trust formation has been conceptualized as context-specific: Users take the specific risks and benefits of a transaction into consideration when forming trusting beliefs and intentions. Since different business models are associated with specific risks and benefits, we propose that trust formation differs based on the context of different business models. We test this proposition by analyzing trust formation in the contexts of both the e-commerce and social networking business models. Based on a survey of 1'666 German Internet users, we identify paths of trust formation leading from trust cues to trusting beliefs and trusting intentions. We find that the pertinent paths in fact differ between the e-commerce and social networking business models.