The economics and psychology of consumer trust in intermediaries in electronic markets: the EM-Trust Framework

The rise of electronic markets (EM) and e-commerce came with the promise of disintermediation. Yet, from aggregators to authenticators, the online landscape today is scattered with intermediaries such as eBay and Verisign, aiming to streamline e-commerce transactions and building consumer trust in EM. The central theme of this paper is to understand the contextual factors that lead to consumers' need to trust intermediaries.