Exploring Donors’ Online Charity Adoption Base on Trust on Information Adoption Process

Abstract

With the development of internet technologies in daily life, online donation has turned to be a preferable path for most donors. Internet has developed to be an important medium for diffusing charity information. According to the exist research in this area, our study proposes a model of trust formation in online charity information, rooted in the information processing theory. The proposed model theorizes trust as a function of the structural quality of information and the expertise of the information source. Furthermore, this relationship moderated by users’ internet literacy ability which also plays important roles on the information determination. Overall, the results will explain substantial variance in trust and highlight the important but distinct roles that information quality, source expertise, and donor’s internet literacy ability play in determining an individual's decision to trust online charity information.