Quality, value, satisfaction, trust, a

2.2. Perceived Difficulty of Evaluation
Intangibility makes it harder for marketers to promote intangible products/services and for
consumers to evaluate offerings with intangible attributes (Zeithaml 1981). Much of the
literature in services marketing has linked intangibility to consumers’ decision-making
difficulties including decreased certainty of evaluation (Mitchell and Greatorex 1993; Murray
1991) and increased difficulty of evaluation (McDougall 1987; McDougall and Snetsinger 1990;
Zeithaml 1981) and processing effort (McDougall 1987). Zeithaml postulated that most goods
fell to the left of the tangibility-intangibility continuum because most goods were easy to
evaluate, whereas most services fell to the right since most services were difficulty to evaluate.
Empirically corroborating Zeithaml’s postulations, Goutaland (1999) found mental intangibility
and generality to be positively related to difficulty of evaluation and no relationship between
physical intangibility and difficulty of evaluation. Likewise, Breivik, Troye and Olsson (1998)
found a positive association between generality and difficulty of evaluation but contrary to
expectations, their empirical study also revealed that inaccessibility to the senses was negatively
associated with perceived difficulty of evaluation.
2.3. Perceived Risk
2.3.1. Types of Perceived Risk
Cox and Rich (1964) first identified two types of perceived risk namely, financial risk
and social-psychological risk. Later on, Jacoby and Kaplan (1981) suggested that overall
perceived risk should include performance risk, physical risk, social risk, psychological risk, and
time risk. Extending previous conceptualizations, researchers identified six types of risk (i.e.,
financial risk, performance risk, physical risk, psychological risk, social risk and convenience
loss or time-related risk) (Murry and Schlacter 1990; Stone and Grønhaug 1993). Although
Murry and Schlacter (1990) believed that all six types of risks were perceived as greater for
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