Lack of trust has been repeatedly identified as one of the most formidable barriers to people for engaging in e-commerce, involving transactions in which financial and personal information is submitted to merchants via the Internet. The future of e-commerce is tenuous without a general climate of online trust. Building consumer trust on the Internet presents a challenge for online merchants and is a research topic of increasing interest and importance. This paper provides an overview of the nature and concepts of trust from multi-disciplinary perspectives, and it reviews relevant studies that investigate the elements of online trust. Also, a framework of trust-inducing interface design features articulated from the existing literature is presented. The design features were classified into four dimensions, namely (1) graphic design, (2) structure design, (3) content design, and (4) social-cue design. By applying the design features identified within this framework to e-commerce web site interfaces, online merchants might then anticipate fostering optimal levels of trust in their customers.

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The performances of three rats were stabilized on a multiple schedule that maintained responding by a free-operant avoidance schedule during independent presentations of tone and light. The simultaneous absence of these stimuli signalled shock-free periods and controlled response cessation. Subsequently, test sessions were administered consisting of independent presentations of each stimulus and these stimuli compounded (tone-plus-light). During an extinction test, additive summation was observed to the compounded stimuli, i.e., more responses were emitted to the compound than to either tone or light. During a series of 28 maintenance-test sessions in which the shock schedule remained operative, the compounded stimuli produced a generally enhanced response rate and fewer pauses terminating with shock than either single stimulus condition. These results extend the generality of free-operant additive summation to responding maintained by aversive control. In addition, a comparison of the present study with previous experiments reporting additive summation of positively reinforced responding indicates that similar variables-rate and aversive differences between training stimulus conditions-should be considered in accounting for response distributions during stimulus compounding when responding is controlled by either positive or negative contingencies.

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