Too much or too few? Trust and Transparency in the Sharing Economy

Details

Supervisors

Aust-Gronarz, Ina

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences de gestion

Abstract

Through the proliferation of technology people have access to a variety of services. The most recent online trend is the sharing economy that enables temporary transmission of resources between strangers meeting on online platforms. Especially services such as ride-sharing and home-sharing received attention lately. Trust is more than ever essential for the functionality of these services, since services facilitate physical contact between providers and customers. Therefore, it is argued that customers and providers of the sharing economy have to give up privacy for transparency to induce trust in their counterparties. Customers and providers create user profiles that accumulate personal information and thus facilitate transparency between partners. While transparency in user profiles facilitates trust, recent studies also show that it provides a fertile ground for discrimination. For instance, profiles pictures and names are used for screening of potential partners based on ethnicity. Therefore, current platform designs should be questioned. Yet, it is unclear, which kind of profile information is necessary to evoke trust and facilitate transactions. Therefore, this master thesis analysed the relationship of trust and transparency in the sharing economy. Contemporary research was enriched by a self-conducted online experiment on ride-sharing investigating two signals of transparency contained in user profiles. User profiles in the experiment differed in terms of displaying names or pseudonyms and varied in the quality of user ratings. The corresponding findings indicate that information in user profiles is not equally valuable and more transparency does not necessarily result in more trust. The results show that names are not perceived significantly better than pseudonyms, suggesting that the real name policy is not vital for the sharing economy. In contrast, reputation showed a strong influence for decisions of participants. Higher reputation increased trust and the likelihood of using sharing services compared to moderate reputation. In this sense, this master thesis outlines practical implications for efficient platform designs for sharing services as well as contributes to the literature investigating the relationship of trust and transparency.