As with other Internet-based business models, trust is a key aspect of collaborative digital platforms, leading to continued product use and positive word of mouth.  Now, a research project carried out by researchers at the UIC Barcelona Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences, Anna Akhmedova, Neus Vila and Marta Mas, has concluded that institutional and interpersonal trust are the main trust mechanisms these platforms use to achieve user loyalty.

In the study, which was published in the international journal Internet Research, the authors developed a trust model based on a review of trust theories in the collaborative economy and empirically evaluated the model using a sample of 235 users of collaborative economy platforms.

The researchers differentiated between platforms that have a standardised service, such as home delivery, and platforms that do not, such as those that rent homes, and proposed two actions. For the first group of platforms, they recommend using the institutional trust mechanism, starting with the creation of value-added services and offering support and guarantees. As for the second group, they recommend using an interpersonal trust mechanism, starting with the creation of signalling tools and teaching their service providers to achieve reliable behaviour.

Reference:

Akhmedova, A., Vila-Brunet, N. and Mas-Machuca, M. (2021), " Building trust in sharing economy platforms: trust antecedents and their configurations ", Internet Research , Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/INTR-04-2020-0212