The content and design of web sites: an empirical study
Information and Management
ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC)
Revisiting the role of web assurance seals in business-to-consumer electronic commerce
Decision Support Systems
What Does Your Online Pharmacy Signal? A Comparative Analysis of Website Trust Features
HICSS '10 Proceedings of the 2010 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
A strategic framework for website evaluation based on a review of the literature from 1995-2006
Information and Management
Activity traces and signals in software developer recruitment and hiring
Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
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An e-business environment results in information asymmetry because buyers cannot physically evaluate the quality of products and easily assess the trustworthiness of sellers. Product and seller quality are communicated through website signals. Using signaling theory, we developed a three-dimensional framework to classify website signals. We empirically tested the framework with a comparative content analysis of websites from a sample of online pharmacies. We found that low-quality sellers were likely to avoid costly and easy-to-verify signals and used fewer signals than did high-quality sellers, who used costly and difficult-to-verify signals and displayed more signals. These results provide information to online buyers and regulatory institutions in charge of online retailer evaluation.