Abstract
Sharewashing describes a platform’s act of misleading consumers by purposely portraying an image of social and ecological principles while the platform’s business model does not necessarily involve them. Drawing on Corporate Social Responsibility and Green Marketing literature, we propose and evaluate a research model for investigating the impact of sharewashing perceptions on consumer trust. Based on survey data from 145 millennials, our results reveal a significant negative effect of sharewashing perceptions on consumer trust, partially mediated by perceptions of risk and confusion. We discuss our findings in view of their practical and strategic relevance to sharing economy platform operators.
Highlights
“In some of the theory and research surrounding ‘the sharing economy,’ sharing is so blurred with traditional marketplace exchanges as to be indistinguishable
While all participants stated to know platforms such as Airbnb, Couchsurfing, Uber, and BlaBlaCar, 94 percent had heard of the term “sharing economy” before and 88 percent stated to have first-hand experience with sharing economy platforms
To establish the hypothesized main effect of this paper, we consider the relation between perceptions of sharewashing and consumer trust (H1)
Summary
“In some of the theory and research surrounding ‘the sharing economy,’ sharing is so blurred with traditional marketplace exchanges as to be indistinguishable. Among the most prominent examples are platforms such as Airbnb and BlaBlaCar, covering concepts which we will refer to as peer-to-peer sharing in the following Platforms such as Uber have often been ascribed a “sharing” business model—and there exists a heated and yet unsettled debate about what the sharing economy is [4]. While this does not necessarily imply less consumption per se, it reduced resource expenditure for a given level of consumption In this sense, sharing economy platforms that enable access to otherwise idle capacity (e.g., empty seats on long distance car rides; BlaBlaCar) have the potential to save resources and may contribute to the UN’s 12th Sustainable Development Goal (Responsible Consumption and Production [6]). We extend the growing body of literature on trust in the sharing economy and shed light on a far barely discussed antecedent of trust [25,26,27,30,31,32]
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