How sharing economy platforms create trust amongst the participants and towards the platform in Finland

This thesis aims to shed light to the currently unanswered question of how sharing economy companies build trust between the platform and peers. The question will be answered on a practical level, by presenting the tools being used in Finnish sharing economy companies, structured based to a multi-dimensional trust model into an integrative framework. This paper will also discuss the interplay and the relationships of the three parties involved, peers and a platform, in the context of the tools and mechanism identified. This research was conducted by combining the previous literature with insight from the field and analyzing and categorizing the results on top of a Tan and Sutherlands (2014) trust model. The previous knowledge was explored through an extensive literature review, also looking into the trust- building mechanisms in the neighboring fields, such as e-commerce, and to gain practical insights from the field, semi-structured interviews with experts were conducted. The findings of this work give an overview of the broad spectrum of the trust-building tools and mechanisms used in the field. These include similarities to the neighboring fields, but also some completely new sharing economy specific tools and mechanisms were identified. One of the key- findings was that sharing economy platforms in Finland tend to find the interpersonal trust-creation more significant than building trust towards the platform and thus, most of the tools used are also targeted to this relationship