As digital technology becomes more prevalent in today’s business environment and interest in digital trust rises, restaurants need to identify whether and how their mobile apps enhance the customer experience, and what features of the apps can strengthen customers’ attachment to them. However, few studies have examined the role of restaurant mobile apps as a catalyst for building customer loyalty. Considering restaurant mobile apps as a means to build a trustworthy relationship between customers and restaurants, this study develops and validates a research framework to measure digital trust between restaurants and customers through restaurant mobile apps. Specifically, due to the lack of measurement constructs for digital trust, a reliable and valid set of measurements that can explain digital trust in relation to restaurant mobile apps is developed and the effects of mobile apps’ digital trust on customers’ trust in a restaurant brand, overall experience, and their continued use intention are assessed.

Research efforts to explain the buyer-seller transaction have evolved from economic utilitarian approaches to ones incorporating social and psychological approaches. Earlier research, for example, relied on transaction cost analysis to help and explain the firm’s engagement in business relationships with a focus on minimizing the direct and opportunity costs of exchange (Lambe, Wittmann, & Speckman, 2001; Rindfleisch & Heide, 1997). Transaction cost analysis, however, is limited in explaining many relationship-based exchanges, of longer terms in particular, that have become more recent business goals and strategies across industries. Such limitations motivated researchers to adopt social and psychological perspectives that could enrich explanations of the exchange relationship. Social exchange theory (hereafter, SET) is one such approach that has resulted in widespread applications in more recent marketing research (Lambe et al., 2001). In addition to economic outcomes of an exchange, SET allows marketers to model non-economic, social and psychological outcomes in understanding and predicting whether the exchange relationship will continue or not.