A Study on the Role of Trust in the Sharing Economy

Abstract

The objective of this study is to examine the role of trust in the sharing economy and to develop a conceptual model for trust enhancing mechanism. The success of sharing services depends upon several factors, such as higher efficiency, IT based platform, and trust. Efficiency is the driving force replacing some of the traditional economy with sharing economy by utilizing the unused parts of the assets while platforms play an important role of facilitating the flows of lenders and users. However, trust, which has been the focus of research on business-to-consumer(B2C) e-commerce in the last decade, becomes the focal point in the success of the sharing economy without which binding customers to the sharing platform is not sustainable. This study contrasts the trust enhancing mechanism of the sharing economy to that of the Future Exchanges and proposes schemes to enhance the balance of asymmetric trust among peer-to-peer. This study is designed to provide an insight into the realm of the sharing economy in the perspective of trust.