بیشتر از عملکرد مالی: اعتماد به سرمایه گذاران در تجارت اجتماعی  More than just financial performance: Trusting investors in social trading

1. Introduction Scholars and practitioners increasingly emphasize the central role of trust in explaining the behavior of online community members (e.g. Chen & Dibb, 2010, Gupta & Kabadayi, 2010). Prior research in offline contexts shows that signals of trustworthiness are important means for actors to create trust (Mayer, Davis, & Schoorman, 1995). Yet, scholars emphasize that signaling trustworthiness plays an even more important role in online communities (O’Sullivan, 2015; Pagani, Hofacker, & Goldsmith, 2011; Shankar, Urban, & Sultan, 2002; Yang & Wang, 2015; Yousafzai, Pallister, & Foxall, 2005; Zhou, Wu, Zhang, & Xu, 2013). The volatility of relationships and a lack of face-to-face interactions among online community members can prevent the development of trust in long-term relationships (Morgan & Hunt, 1994). Scholars emphasize that “lack of trust is one of the greatest barriers inhibiting online trade” (Shankar et al., 2002, pp. 325) and that trust signals “play important roles” (Pagani et al., 2011, p. 442) in overcoming these barriers. Community members who proactively signal their trustworthiness online possess a powerful means to affect the behavior of other members (Gamboa & Gonçalves, 2014). However, although scholars strongly emphasize the importance of signaling trustworthiness to support the coordination of behavior in online communities, trust within such communities is a nascent and largely untapped area of research. This study aims to contribute to this emerging debate by examining signals of trustworthiness in the context of social trading. Scholars frequently examine online communities that serve as marketing channels (Ashley & Tuten, 2015), evaluation platforms (Orlikowski & Scott, 2013), sharing facilities (Yang & Wang, 2015), and sites for networking (Park, Shin, & Ju, 2015), but pay far less attention to social trading as a growing application of online communities (Doering, Neumann, & Paul, 2015; Pan, Altshuler, & Pentland, 2012). Social trading platforms allow investors to invest immediately and to observe other investors’ trades and track records. Such social trading platforms form networks in which copy trading is a unique and increasingly popular opportunity. A network permitting copy trading means one where investors can automatically, simultaneously, and unconditionally replicate other investors’ trades. The trustworthiness of online community members plays an even more important role in the online trading context. By directly copying the investment decisions of other online community members without evaluating the specific investments beforehand, investors entrust their investment decisions to other traders they have probably never seen in person. This trust-based delegation of decision authority is not common in other online communities and, owing to the immediate impact of trust on investment decisions, constitutes an interesting context for the examination of signals of trustworthiness. The present study draws on the differentiation between cognitionbased and affect-based signals of trustworthiness (McAllister, 1995) to investigate the necessary and sufficient signals that make traders appear trustworthy in the eyes of other investors, and thus promptcopy-trading decisions. The establishment of trust in online communities through the signaling of trustworthiness is a complex process (Shankar et al., 2002), and accordingly examining the phenomenon demands sophisticated methods to unlock its complexity (O’Sullivan, 2015; Roig-Tierno, Baviera-Puig, & Buitrago Vera, 2013; Weijo, Hietanen, & Mattila, 2014). Therefore, the current study applies fuzzyset qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA): fsQCA consciously infuses a qualitative logic to unbundle multifaceted, asymmetric, and equifinal phenomena that scholars might not be able to explore equally well using common quantitative methods (Armstrong, 2012; Fiss, 2011; Rauch, Deker, & Woodside, 2013; Woodside, 2013; Woodside & Zhang, 2013). This study investigates the focal phenomenon by examining activity on eToro – currently the largest social trading platform – with a dataset of signals of trustworthiness from 642,488 members.