Meaningless procedures can be meaningful for information security: consumer use of single and multiple cues in information security inferences

Exchanging and transferring digital information is an essential process in marketing. While digital information security has become a critical success factor, little empirical work has addressed underlying psychological processes of how consumers perceive and infer information security. We confirm that consumers hold a belief that security is positively correlated with usage complexity. We demonstrate that consumers’ security evaluations can be enhanced by simply increasing usage complexity, irrespective of its relevance to actual security level. Moreover, neither consumer knowledge nor multiple cues associated with objective information security appeared to eliminate this complexity-security inference. Based on this trade-off relationship, we propose strategic implications for corporate reputation, product development, web authentication service, and global market expansion.