Trustworthiness of Technology acceptance model

        Trustworthiness is defined as "the perceived willingness of the source to make valid assertions" (McCracken 1989, p. 311) and relates to the consumer’s belief that the information source delivers a message in an objective and honest manner (Ohanian, 1991). Trustworthiness can be seen as the perceived motivation of information source to communicate a message without bias (McGuire, 1969; Senecal & Nantel, 2004) that relates to the source’s honesty and believability (McGinnies & Ward, 1980). Source trustworthiness depends on the perceived source's motives to share particular information (Dou et al., 2012, p.1557). When consumers evaluate the trustworthiness of information source, they build their opinion on the causal inferences they make about source’s motives to write a product review (McCracken, 1989). In order to analyse the persuasive influence of source information, it is beneficial to use Attribution Theory. It depicts ‘‘how people make causal inferences, what sort of inferences they make, and what the consequences are’’ (Folkes, 1988, p. 548) and is used to explain how people perceive a source’s motivation to recommend a product (Folkes, 1988; Lee & Youn, 2009; Rifon, et al., 2004). An information source can have both product-related (external) and non-product related (internal) motives to endorse a product (Rifon, et al., 2004, p.31). If a customer sees a positive opinion about the product, he might believe that the reviewer thought that a product has favourable features (product-related or external motivation). On the contrary, a financial compensation received by the source for writing a favourable product review represents the non-product related motivation (internal motivation) (Folkes, 1988; Sen & Lerman, 2007). Since consumers do not know the reviewer’s motivations, they might be sceptical about their real intention thus develop a lower level of trustworthiness and credibility towards the source and thus, are not willing to make a purchase (Rifon et al., 2004; Romani, 2006).

        Moreover, studies revealed that if online reviewer provides a review, which content match the source scope of interest, consumers may believe in altruistic (external) motivation of the source (Rifon et al., 2004). If the content of the review does not match the source scope of interest, consumers are more sceptical about the provided information and less trustworthy towards the source (Dou et al., 2012, p.1556). Thus, ascribing external motivation to source's intention increased the degree of perceived credibility to the source, and contributes to customers' positive attitudes to the source (Dou et al., 2012, p.1557). When a communicator is perceived to be highly trustworthy, the information provided by him/her has a stronger influence on the attitude change (Ohanian, 1990, p.41). Therefore, we consider trustworthiness of online reviews as an important factor determining information adoption. We applied a reliable measurement adopted from Ohanian (1990) in order to assess the dimension of trustworthiness. The measure includes three items such as "honest", "reliable" and "trustworthy", which were previously used to represent trustworthiness and had high loadings (Ohanian, 1990).