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Top1. Introduction
Information technology (IT) has enabled people to share new aspects of their lives, from cars to homes (Brian, 2019). These sharing practices have been described as “sharing economy”. While the formal definition of a sharing economy is not widely adopted, it is often used to refer collectively to the exchange of assets or services that are not used by co-workers or between businesses and consumers (Oh, & Moon, 2016; Barhoun et al., 2019). Along with this trend, the sharing economy has become one of the most prominent topics in the computing research community, especially human computer interaction (HCI) (Lampinen et al., 2015).
Sharing is closely related to trust (Belk, 2010). In the context of a sharing economy, trust is considered to play an important role and is even called currency (Rogers & Botsman, 2010). Hawlitschek et al. (2016), and Voeth et al. (2015) refer to building trust as a major challenge for suppliers in the context of sharing economy. After years of fundamental research on trust in B2C e-commerce, such as Gefen (2000), McKnight and Chervany (2001), Gefen and Straub (2004), and Kim et al. (2018), I can explore the role of trust in consumer-consumer (C2C) e-commerce (Jones & Leonard, 2008; Yoon & Occeña, 2015). It is one, if not the important driving factor for the long term success of C2C platforms (Strader & Ramaswami, 2002). As a result, platform operators have over-architected design patterns and mechanisms to establish and maintain trust between users, including cross-reviews and rating schemes, validation mechanisms, or meaningful user profiles (Teubner, 2014). Trust, however, is multifaceted and complex, and pinning is difficult (Keen et al., 1999). In traditional (B2C) e-commerce, the IS perspective (Gefen & Straub, 2004) can be understood as a willingness to rely on online suppliers, but the picture is more complex in the C2C market. Sharing economy users typically participate in interaction with multiple parties, such as platform operators and other individuals. As a result, the roles of vendors and customers are taken by private individuals, sharing passenger cars, renting cars, apartments or other equipment. However, this platform acts as a broker and intermediary between the two markets and may appear to be reliable. In this context, trust can be influenced by privacy concerns (Joinson et al., 2010) or website quality (Gregg & Walczak, 2010). Moreover, products (and related experiences) themselves (such as private rental apartments or cars) can be subject to trust (Gefen et al., 2008). In particular, formal quality standards, provincial regulations, or tests for this somewhat new market (Avital et al., 2015) are carried out.