The impact of relative information quality of e-commerce assurance seals on Internet purchasing behavior Vishal Lala a , Vicky Arnold b, * , Steve G. Sutton b,c , Liming Guan d a Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK, USA b Department of Accounting, University of Connecticut, 2100 Hillside Road, Storrs, CT 06269, USA c University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia d University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, USA Received 1 June 2002; received in revised form 15 July 2002; accepted 31 July 2002 Abstract WebTrust assurance was introduced jointly by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA) with much fanfare in the late 1990s. Since then, the WebTrust product has not experienced significant market penetration despite providing the highest level of information quality among seals available in the Internet seal market. One reason often given for its poor market penetration is that consumers are unable to differentiate between the information quality of different Internet seals. The purpose of this study is to examine the validity of this explanation. Marketing theory related to consumer risk is used to provide a conceptual foundation for hypotheses related to consumer preferences for Internet seals in general and high information quality seals in particular. The results of the study fail to find consumer interest in a low information quality seal, but did show a strong effect related to preference for a high information quality seal. Unexpectedly, however, these results were not related to buyers’ risk propensities. D 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Assurance seals; Information systems assurance; E-commerce assurance; WebTrust; Consumer risk; Vendor risk; Product risk 1467-0895/02/$ – see front matter D 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. PII:S1467-0895(02)00069-6 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +1-860-486-0057. E-mail address: varnold@sba.uconn.edu (V. Arnold). International Journal of Accounting Information Systems 3 (2002) 237 – 253