Leveraging Social Grouping for Organizational Endorsement in Mobile Commerce Across Cultures: Transforming Outgroups into Ingroups

As a subset of e-commerce, m-commerce (mobile commerce) also faces problems of trust building. The limitation of mobile devices, such as screen size, privacy and safety problem, make it important to build trust effectively and efficiently. In e-commerce, culture can exert a significant impact on how trust is built through various web strategies. Similarly, trust-building strategies in m-commerce could also have different effects on people in specific cultures, because of the extent to which they favor in-groups versus out-groups. Given features of mobile technologies and growing popularity of social network media, it is interesting to investigate whether personalized trust building via social ties with consumers could be explored to transform entities viewed as out-groups into in-groups of consumers, and the extent to which such strategies are effective in different cultures. Three studies are planned to pursue this line of enquiry. The results could have important implications for scholars and practitioners to leverage on social ties to boost sales in m-commerce.