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

Abstract

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 predominantly on community generated trust and reputation information. However, how such information impacts user judgement is still being understood. To explore such effects, we constructed an artificial SE accommodation platform where we varied the elements related to hosts' digital identity, measuring users' perceptions and decisions to interact. Across three studies, we find that trust and reputation information increases not only the users' perceived trustworthiness, credibility, and sociability of hosts, but also the propensity to rent a private room in their home. This effect is seen when providing users both with complete profiles and profiles with partial user-selected information. Closer investigations reveal that three elements relating to the host's digital identity are sufficient to produce such positive perceptions and increased rental decisions, regardless of which three elements are presented. Our findings have relevant implications for human judgment and privacy in the SE, and question its current culture of ever increasing information-sharing. S1 Profile ElementsBelow is a description of each element comprising the profiles of hosts shown to participants, along with an example of how it appeared in the experiments. Room PhotoCreation: The room images were selected from Airbnb. These were limited to a single borough of London, within one standard deviation (SD) of the average price for a room in the area, equating quality and amenities offered. TitleCreation: Selected directly from Airbnb. These were controlled for word length (3-7), location information, and other identifying cues. Description of roomCreation: Room descriptions were taken from Airbnb. These focused on descriptive information, did not contain identifying location cues or opinions, and were constrained to between 20-50 words. Host PhotoCreation: The profile photos were created from the Chicago Face Database, which offers descriptions of each photo with ratings on several factors [1]. Here, facial dominance, trustworthiness, attractiveness, and ethnicity were controlled, as differences in facial traits can influence decision-making (e.g., [2,3]. Only images that did not deviate more than ±1 SD from the mean on each characteristic, within one ethnicity (White-Caucasian), were selected.The same care was given to the "guest" and "host" reviews photos, without limiting ethnicity. Star RatingCreation: The star ratings on the profiles were dynamically and randomly generated for each profile. The stars ranged from 1 to 5 in half-star increments, however, the distribution was limited to 4 to 5 stars, as is typical of such profiles [4,5].

Gorilla in our midst: An online behavioral experiment builder

“…By lowering the barrier, Gorilla aims to make online experiments available and transparent at all levels of ability. Currently, experiments have been conducted in Gorilla on a wide variety of topics, including cross-lingual priming (Poort & Rodd, 2017), the provision of lifestyle advice for cancer prevention (Usher-Smith et al, 2018), semantic variables and list memory (Pollock, 2018), narrative engagement (Richardson et al, 2018), trust and reputation in the sharing economy (Zloteanu, Harvey, Tuckett, & Livan, 2018), how individuals' voice identities are formed (Lavan, Knight, & McGettigan, 2018), and auditory perception with degenerated music and speech (Jasmin, Dick, Holt, & Tierney, 2018). Also, several studies have preregistered reports, including explorations of object size and mental simulation of orientation (Chen, de Koning, & Zwaan, 2018) and the use of face regression models to study social perception (Jones, 2018).…”

Gorilla in our Midst: An online behavioral experiment builder

“…By lowering the barrier, Gorilla aims to make online experiments available and transparent at all levels of ability. Currently, experiments have been conducted in Gorilla on a wide variety of topics, including: cross-lingual priming (Poort & Rodd, 2017), the provision of lifestyle advice for cancer prevention (Usher-Smith et al, 2018), semantic variables and list 12 memory (Pollock, 2018), narrative engagement (Richardson et al, 2018), trust and reputation in the sharing economy (Zloteanu, Harvey, Tuckett, & Livan, 2018), how individual's voice identities are formed (Lavan, Knight, & McGettigan, 2018), and auditory perception with degenerated music and speech (Jasmin, Dick, Holt, & Tierney, 2018). Also, several studies have pre-registered reports, including: object size and mental simulation of orientation (Chen, de Koning, & Zwaan, 2018) and the use of face regression models to study social perception (Jones, 2018).…”

Trust and other factors impacting the platform choice in sharing economy: A case from Poland

“…Most of the authors of publications on the sharing economy focus in their research on the precise interpretation of the concept of the sharing economy, pointing to its forms and specificity, including Hamari et al (2016); Schor (2014), Sundarajan (2016), Ziobrowska (2017).Some devote their research to specific sectors of the sharing economy by analysing the activities of individual platforms (Ert et al, 2016;Guttentag, 2015). Only a few authors present in a deeper way the role of trust in the sharing economy (Kamal & Chen, 2016;Mazzella & Sundarajan, 2016;Zoteanu et al, 2018), where Botsman -an author of many books, articles and speeches on the TED TALK platform -is cited as one of the most popular publicists for trust in sharing economy.…”