Where does perceived security risk collide?

The overall expectation of loss an adopter associates with pursuing a desired outcome through an electronic service, decomposed into facets. Featherman and Pavlou's 2003 Predicting e-services adoption: a perceived risk facets perspective carried the consumer-behaviour tradition into information systems, defining perceived risk as the potential for loss in the pursuit of a desired outcome from using an e-service and splitting it into performance, financial, time, psychological, social, and privacy facets, with an overall risk item on top. In their study of an electronic payment service the facets, above all performance and privacy risk, lowered perceived usefulness and the intention to adopt. The referent is a belief a would-be user holds about what they might lose, not a measured flaw in the service.[1]

Unit

An adopter's belief about loss from an e-service

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Overall perceived-risk item plus six facet subscales; usefulness and adoption intention as criteria

The parent idea that consumer behaviour is risk taking, because any purchase can produce consequences the buyer cannot anticipate with certainty. Bauer put this to the American Marketing Association in 1960, and the tradition after him modelled perceived risk as two components multiplied together, the uncertainty that an unwanted outcome will occur and the seriousness of the loss if it does. Mitchell's 1999 review, Consumer perceived risk: conceptualisations and models, traced thirty years of that work, weighed the subjective-versus-objective and risk-versus-uncertainty debates, and judged the two-component model still the most useful for researchers. This is the source from which the technology-adoption versions were drawn, one belief about anticipated loss rather than a catalogue of facets.[2][3]

Unit

A buyer's belief about loss from a purchase

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Uncertainty and consequence components, combined multiplicatively into an overall perceived risk

The perceived risk of a transaction with a specific online seller, set opposite trust as the two forces that govern whether a consumer will buy. Pavlou's 2003 Consumer Acceptance of Electronic Commerce: Integrating Trust and Risk with the Technology Acceptance Model added perceived risk and trust to the technology acceptance model, defining risk as the buyer's belief about the likelihood of loss in an online exchange, driven by the seller's possible opportunism and by the impersonal, uncertain web environment. Trust lowers this risk, and the risk that remains suppresses the intention to transact. The referent narrows from a technology in general to one exchange with one counterparty, but it stays the same belief about expected loss.[4]

Unit

A buyer's belief about loss from one online exchange

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Perceived transaction-risk items alongside trust; intention to transact as the criterion