The Sharing Economy: How Trust and Reputation Shape our Behaviour

Digital Identity: The Effect of Trust and Reputation Information on User Judgement in the Sharing Economy

The Sharing Economy (SE) is a growing ecosystem focusing on peer-to-peer enterprise. In the SE the information available to assist individuals (users) in making decisions focuses on community-generated trust and reputation information (TRI). To explore how such information impacts user judgement, we constructed an artificial SE accommodation platform where we varied the elements related to hosts’ digital identity. Across multiple studies, we find TRI increases perceptions of hosts’ trustworthiness, credibility, and sociability, and the propensity to rent their rooms. Our findings have implications for user judgment and privacy in the SE, and question the current culture of ever increasing information-sharing.