Impact of consumer empowerment on online trust: An examination across genders

Consumer empowerment is a psychological construct related to the individual's perception of the extent to which he/she can control the distribution and use of his/her personally identifying information. It has been argued to have an impact on consumers' privacy concerns and trust in e‐commerce. However, very little is known about the difference in male and female perceptions of this control. This investigation is focused on examining how perceptions between the genders differ concerning consumer empowerment and privacy concerns, and how the consumer empowerment results in perceptions of trust and decrease in privacy concerns. We test our proposed hypotheses using data collected from 322 experienced online consumers. Our results show that empowerment has a stronger positive effect on trust for males than for females, and that privacy concerns have stronger negative impact on trust for females than for males.