Master's Thesis: The trust currency in the Sharing Economy: An experimental Framework. (original) (raw)

This Master’s thesis focuses on trust in the Sharing Economy. Trust is an invaluable asset, while sharing is an important social driver in the modern world. Peer-to-peer platforms in the realm of the Sharing Economy are Airbnb and BlaBlaCar. The analysis of this work refers to the so-called triangular structure of trust. The decision to rent or take a trip is linked to spending time with the service provider involves face-to-face interaction, that why the Sharing Economy services need to draw attention to sociological aspects of trust building, that could include different types of discrimination. The main goal of this graduate work is to better understand the trusting decision process involving consumers and providers. Experimental framework was based on Trust Game designed by Berg et al. in 1995 and created a sort of Sharing Game. Analysis of real collected data through Lime survey confirm that the Millennials uses sharing services at most. The level of general trust was unexpectedly very high. Majority of respondents used Airbnb and BlaBlaCar in the past. It results that the level of trust in women is higher than in men from both genders. Instead the average level of trust in the same nationality and trust in other nationality is almost identical. There were not found a strong discrimination effect, as was found in other American researchers provided by Edelman and Luca in 2014. Instead was found strong gender discrimination effect. Providing more relevant information about actors in markets may be an effective strategy to reduce any discrimination effects. Keywords: Sharing economy, trust, experiments, framework, Airbnb, BlaBlaCar