To Örebro University

Trust is intimately connected with relational interactions, but does it also have a role to play in transactional exchanges? How would it differ? While trust has been discussed extensively in sharing economy research, the focus has been on trust cues created in exchanges between strangers, thereby approaching trust empirically rather than theoretically. Focusing on user trust, this paper investigates how trust constructs from relational interactions manifest in the sharing economy. This paper bridges sharing economy research with trust as a theoretical construct to investigate the well-established variables of ability, benevolence and integrity as components of trust in the sharing economy. The paper is based on a questionnaire survey of 175 users of Uber's co-driving service UberPop. Descriptive and regression analyses were conducted focusing on user trust in the platform and providers. The findings indicate how trust in transactional exchanges is shaped differently compared with trust in relational interactions. User trust in providers, which diminishes over time, is based on emotional traits, while user trust in the platform is based on functional components. The platform and providers thereby complement each other in terms of the trust created. This paper contributes to research on trust by focusing on trust in transactional exchanges, and to research on the sharing economy by investigating trust based on theoretical constructs.

As the sharing economy has expanded and thereby increased its number of users and providers, trust has become increasingly central in its conduct (Ert, Fleischer, & Magen, 2016), following from needs to evaluate strangers as counterparts and based on misconducts among such parties (Öberg, 2018). In practice, trust is expected to be facilitated by the platforms, while evaluation tools include making users and producers less anonymous to one another (Wu, Zeng, & Xie, 2017). Thispaper elaborates on trust in the sharing economy related to one of its most well-grown platforms, Uber. The paper departs from Mayer, Davis, & Schoorman’s (1995) antecedents to trust to explain how these materialize in the sharing economy, as well as how personal traits of peers affect the probability to trust other parties and thereby participate in the sharing economy. The paper adopts a quantitative, questionnaire approach (178 respondents, research conducted in Sweden) to address this issue. The paper points at how trust extends beyond trusting the platform as a facilitating party and links to trusting also the driver. Ability, benevolence and the trustor’s propensity have positive effects on trust, while the trustee’s willingness to take risks links tothe trust construct. Contributions are made to research on the sharing economy through the in-depth analysis of antecedents related to trust, and through discussing trust as linked both to the trustee and trustor in such settings. The in-depth discussion on trust interlinks previous research on trust with the sharing economy as an empirical phenomenon and thereby provides a two-way bridging of concepts and theorizing that fosters developments of both areas of investigations.