Trust Transfer in Sharing Accommodation: The Moderating Role of Privacy Concerns

Sharing accommodation (SA) has gained rapid growth in the last decade. To offer better service to users, the platform and hosts have to extensively collect and utilize confidential user data and information. With the extensive collection and utilization of personal user information, there are potential problems of data abuse and leakage, which makes users’ privacy concerns an important and unavoidable issue for repeated purchases and the sustainable development of SA. Privacy concerns are thus not only an important antecedent of purchase behaviors, but also an important conditional variable that will have impacts on the formation of trust and user purchase behaviors. However, the moderating effect of privacy concerns on trust formation has rarely been examined in the SA literature. To fill this knowledge gap, drawing on trust transfer theory and trust literature, this study builds a theoretical model to examine the relationships of three types of institution-based trust (i.e., trust in the SA platform, trust in the user community, and trust in the host community) and their effects on continuous use intention. Moreover, this study explores the moderating effect of privacy concerns on institution-based trust transfer in the context of SA. We then collected data through a questionnaire survey from experienced users of two reputable SA platforms in China, and empirically tested the research model with 470 valid responses. The results show that trust in the user community positively affects trust in the SA platform and trust in the host community; trust in the SA platform and trust in the host community positively affect users’ continuous use intention. Meanwhile, privacy concerns negatively moderate the relationship between trust in the user community and trust in the SA platform, as well as the relationship between trust in the user community and trust in the host community. The findings confirm the moderating role of privacy concerns in the trust transfer process, complementing existing research on trust transfer theory and trust