Trust Building in the Sharing Economy : How Companies Build Trust between Peers and towards the Platform

Purpose With trust being an essential component in the sharing economy, this paper aims to understand how trust is established in practice and which relationships between consumer, supplier and platform specific tools and processes serve. Problem Previous research has acknowledged the importance of trust but solely investigated single trust-building tools. Instead of presenting a trust construct composed of mechanisms describing their interplay between the three parties involved in the sharing economy, previous scholars have focused their research on the specificities of single tools and processes. With the sharing economy as a recent phenomenon, companies have an interest in investigating the implementation of different mechanisms and their effectiveness. Method and Methodology This paper adopts a qualitative research approach in which content analysis was applied to group tools and processes and link them to one of the six trust streams between consumer, supplier and the platform. Moreover, the research deductively builds on existing literature by using present theory as a foundation and inductively analyses findings based on collected data. Findings The findings of this paper reveal a broad spectrum of different trust-building tools and processes. Linking these to one of the specific relationship between the three parties in the sharing economy, this paper concludes that companies emphasize on gaining the consuming peer’s trust both towards the platforms and the supplying peers