The Influence of Regulation on Trust and Risk Preference in Sharing Communities.

Sarah Marth,Thomas Sabitzer,Eva Hofmann,Elfriede Penz,Barbara Hartl

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01369

Abstract

Sharing within communities has gained popularity in recent years. However, taking part in a community also comes with a certain amount of risk. This perceived amount of risk can be contained by regulations within a community as well as by potential participants’ trust in the community and the other members. We argue for a relation between regulation and the willingness to take the risk of joining a sharing community with trust as a mediator. Thereby, we distinguish between two kinds of regulation (soft and harsh regulation) and two kinds of trust (implicit and reason-based trust) on two different levels (vertical and horizontal trust). In one laboratory and one online experiment with 432 participants overall, we found that the compound of high soft and low harsh regulation increases participants’ willingness to take the risk of participation and that the effect of soft regulation is mediated mainly by vertical and horizontal reason-based trust. Based on our results, we encourage sharing communities to count on soft regulation in order to increase potential members’ trust in the community and therefore take the risk to participate.

Highlights

The sharing economy encompasses different social and economic practices and replaces ownership with the temporal access to goods
The results showed that participants in the condition of high harsh regulation (HR+) ascribe significantly higher levels of harsh regulation to the car-sharing community than participants in the condition of low harsh regulation (HR−) [MHR+ = 4.95, SDHR+ = 0.17; MHR− = 2.27, SDHR− = 0.17; F(1,232) = 131.04, p < 0.01, ηp2 = 0.36]
Participants in the condition of high soft regulation (SR+) rate the car-sharing community to operate with higher levels of soft regulation than participants of the low soft regulation condition (SR−) [MSR+ = 4.76, SDSR+ = 0.11; MSR− = 3.41, SDSR− = 0.11; F(1,232) = 78.10, p < 0.01, ηp2 = 0.25]

Summary

Introduction

The sharing economy encompasses different social and economic practices and replaces ownership with the temporal access to goods (cf. Botsman and Rogers, 2010; Belk, 2014). A good is shared, organized, and maintained by people who have in common that they all want to make use of the same goods (cf Glover et al, 2005; Birky and Strom, 2013) This more social and less anonymous form of sharing can be referred to as sharing community (cf Bardhi and Eckhardt, 2012) and comes with individual, societal, and environmental benefits (cf Heinrichs, 2013; Kim et al, 2015). It was explained that all computers are linked to each other and that the participants would have to imagine sharing a car in a group of four people They were told that these groups consisted of the participants in the room and that they would be randomly assigned to one of these groups.

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion