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unique and especially important. The durability of trust created through value congruence (i.e., affect-based trust) makes it more desirable than trust created through other means. This qualitative difference sets value congruence apart.
This research examines values congruence, and shows that it is a critical component of an overall trust management strategy for an organization. The results provide very strong support for Stewardship Theory and its role in e-commerce. In particular it shows that individuals are often willing to pay price premiums and share personal information with organizations that they perceive as having congruent values. Surprisingly, value congruence not only increases trust, but also has a direct effect on consumers that is even greater than its intermediate effect through trust. In fact, the direct effect of value congruence on the willingness to pay price premiums is consistently double or triple the magnitude of the effect of trust on price premiums. This is also the case for information disclosure. Value congruence thus can be an effective tool for enabling for online retailers to charge price premiums and achieve higher margins, sales, and profits.
Several practical implications can be drawn from this research. The first is that value congruence is an especially useful instrument for organizations that can support environmental, charitable, or political organizations. These are organizations toward which many individuals have very strong feelings. If a business organization can identify a certain target group that cares deeply about a specific set of values that the organization also believes in, and if it can position itself to support such a set of values, it can benefit greatly from the increased trust and goodwill from the target group.
Second, subject to an organization’s type and the diversity of its customer base, it may not be able to appeal to all of its customer groups simultaneously. When it is not possible to appeal to all customer groups at once, it may be prudent to avoid value conflicts by not supporting and not opposing any values, or by promoting more generic