Visual trust signals in digital financial marketplaces: eye-tracking evidence from verification badges

Purpose This study examines when a platform-issued verification badge affects consumer choice in a high-uncertainty digital financial marketplace. Integrating signaling theory and attention-based choice research, it distinguishes signal assignment, item-card visual consideration, post-task self-reported badge noticing, and hypothetical selection. Design/methodology/approach A controlled eye-tracking experiment involved 60 participants. Each participant viewed 10 NFT listings, five randomly assigned a badge within the participant's choice set, and selected three listings for hypothetical purchase. Item-card fixation, time to first fixation, fixation count and selection were analyzed using participant and item fixed effects and a Cox model. Findings Badged item-cards were fixated in 83.3% of observations, compared with 35.7% for unbadged item-cards. Among cards with an observed first fixation, badge assignment was associated with an approximately 1.47-s earlier first fixation. Hypothetical selection rates were 42.3% for badged listings and 17.7% for unbadged listings. The estimated badge-selection relationship was substantially stronger among participants who reported clearly noticing the badge. The gaze measures concern the full item-card rather than direct badge-icon fixation, and noticing was not experimentally manipulated. Originality/value By combining randomized cue assignment, eye-tracking, and item-level choice data, the study provides process-level evidence consistent with an attention-gated signaling account. It extends digital trust-cue research from service-level adoption to micro-level choice while bounding the evidence to hypothetical selection in a controlled interface.