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The sharing economy represents the embodiment of the peer-to-peer-based activity of obtaining, giving, or sharing the access to goods and services, coordinated through community-based online services (Hamari et al., 2016). Largely facilitated by the development of information technology, the sharing economy has proliferated over the last decade. It is estimated that the number of adult users of the sharing economy in the US reached 44.8 million in 2016, and the number is expected to grow to 86.5 million by 2021 (Lock, 2019). As predicted, the total value of the global sharing economy will increase to about 335 billion US dollars by 2025, from only 15 billion US dollars in 2014 (Mazareanu, 2019). The emergence of the sharing economy has drawn increasingly more attention increasingly in academia. It can be seen in a rapid increase of publications on the sharing economy after 2013 in such diverse areas such as business, computer science, and engineering.
The concept of sharing of resources has a history almost as long as that of humankind (e.g., Belk, 2010; Sundararajan, 2016). However, the current prosperity of the sharing economy is primarily due to the development of digital platforms and other large-scale mediating technologies (Allen, 2017; Belk, 2014; Botsman & Rogers, 2010). The presence of such technologies separates those businesses and communities under the term “sharing economy” from traditional sharing contexts (e.g., Bardhi & Eckhardt, 2012; Hamari et al., 2016).
From a pure information technology perspective, sharing economy platforms do not significantly differ from other digital platforms. What differentiates them is the novel context for the use of technology. Following the idea of Sutherland and Jarrahi (2018), in this paper, the authors conceptualize sharing economy platforms as sociotechnical systems, whose role and meaning merge in use. Explicitly, instead of treating sharing economy platforms as isolated technological materiality, the authors define the platforms from interactions with human strategies and goals. From the sociotechnical perspective, multiple distinctive affordances can be identified for sharing economy platforms to compare with other digital platforms (Sutherland & Jarrahi, 2018). For example, they should yield more advanced search and match algorithms to assign proper participants to each other. The platforms should provide enough assurance to allow people to improve or extend interactions across weak and anonymous connections.
Hospitality sharing is an essential industry within the sharing economy, which is enabled by online sharing hospitality platforms. Online hospitality platforms refer to online marketplaces for people to lease or rent short-term lodging. Usually, the platforms do not own any real estate or conduct tours; they act as brokers who receive percentage service fees in conjunction with every booking. In 2015, the number of adult hospitality sharing economy users in the US was 10.3 million, and this number is predicted to grow to about 17 million by the end of 2020 (Statista Research Department, 2016). Airbnb, as the most successful and representative company in this industry, has already had more than 640,000 hosts and 4 million listings by 2018 (Smith, 2018). It has near 5 million lodging listings in 81,000 cities and is in over 191 countries and has facilitated over 300 million check-ins (Airbnb, 2018). As the authors discussed earlier in this section, online sharing hospitality platforms, as one of the most popular groups of sharing economy platforms, should yield multiple distinctive characteristics due to their use context. Therefore, in this paper, the authors are interested in investigating the acceptance problem of online sharing hospitality platforms.