Consumer motives for peer-to-peer sharing
Introduction
Today's e-commerce landscape has undergone the development of novel and innovative forms of online marketplaces. An ever-growing variety of platforms now enables resource coordination and exchange among private individuals (PwC, 2015; Sundararajan, 2016). While the rapid growth of ventures such as Airbnb is virtually unparalleled (Avital et al., 2015, 2014), many other platforms fail to grow and eventually vanish (Choudary, 2013; Van Alstyne et al., 2016). Against this background, it is vital for platform operators to understand the clientele they are serving and what attracts and alienates their current (and prospective) users. Thus, research providing deeper insights into consumers' motives for or against partaking in this “sharing economy” is essential.
Importantly, the popular notion of the sharing economy represents an umbrella term and often subsumes a broad variety of concepts and ideas. Common examples include “collaborative consumption” (Botsman and Rogers, 2010; Meelen and Frenken, 2015), “access-based consumption” (Bardhi and Eckhardt, 2012), and “commercial sharing systems” (Lamberton and Rose, 2012). Within the scope of this work, we focus on a specific subset within the broader sharing economy landscape, which we denote as peer-to-peer sharing (PPS). PPS comprises peer-based transactions that can be characterized as non-corporate, commercial, temporal, and tangible. We present a more detailed definition for the context of this work in Section 2. To understand consumer motives (i.e., drivers, prerequisites, and impediments) for peer-to-peer sharing, we employ and empirically evaluate a comprehensive theoretical model grounded in the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991, 1985). In this context, a motive for or against a certain activity can be defined as a factor that arouses, directs, and integrates a person's behavior in relation to this activity (Iso-Ahola, 1982). Based on prior literature, we explore 17 prospective motives and their effects on consumer attitude, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, behavioral intention, and actual PPS platform usage. Overall, we find empirical support for twelve distinct factors playing a significant role as antecedents of PPS usage. Among these, our findings suggest that financial benefits and the desire to display a modern lifestyle are the strongest drivers and that trust in other users represents a crucial precondition. On the other side of the coin, effort expectancy, process risk concerns, and the independence gained through ownership (instead of relying on sharing alternatives) are key impediments to PPS usage. In linking consumer motives to intentions and actual platform usage, this paper makes two core contributions. First, based on our extensive overview of prospective motives, we present a validated, survey-based measurement model with satisfactory psychometric properties. Second, we establish a comprehensive model of consumer motives for either taking part in or evading PPS services, thereby shedding light on the usage of platform-mediated PPS as a socio-technical system.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we describe the basic principles of the sharing economy and introduce a tangible delineation of PPS. We then review the literature on sharing economy adoption and consumer motives, on the basis of which we derive a theoretical model. Section 3 then presents the procedures and results of our survey. We discuss our findings in Section 4. Section 5 concludes.
Section snippets
Related work and hypotheses development
Almost 30 years ago, Malone et al. (1987) foresaw that information technology (IT) would reduce transaction costs and thus make market-based coordination increasingly attractive in comparison to hierarchical coordination. The emergence of the sharing economy may be regarded as one manifestation of this progressive shift from hierarchical to decentralized and peer-based market schemes. Today, platforms such as Airbnb enable users to share access to their private resources with a large community
Survey design and procedure
To evaluate the proposed research model, we conducted two surveys. In the first survey, we operationalized and validated the measurement instruments for all of the model's constructs as reported in Hawlitschek et al. (2016b). To evaluate the proposed hypotheses in this study, we then conducted a second, large-scale online survey. In line with recent research on sharing platforms, we argue that PPS is particularly attractive to young users and so-called millennials (Akbar et al., 2016; EU, 2017;
Discussion
This paper makes two core contributions. First, we develop a validated, survey-based measurement model for consumer motives with satisfactory psychometric properties. This eases the study of PPS consumers for researchers and practitioners alike. Second, we establish a comprehensive model of consumer motives for taking part in or avoiding PPS, shedding light on the social side of platform-mediated PPS as a socio-technical system. Overall, we identified 12 distinct consumer motives as
Conclusion
The sharing economy is a growing and fascinating phenomenon. Peer-to-peer sharing (PPS) represents an important sub-category therein, including services such as accommodation sharing (e.g., Airbnb, Homestay), ride sharing (e.g., BlaBlaCar), and many niche platforms for renting special-purpose commodities (e.g., camera equipment, outdoor gear, boats, etc.). As we have highlighted in this paper, the range of user motives for either taking part in or avoiding PPS is truly diverse. While previous
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Marc Hild for his valuable support and feedback during the elaboration of the foundations of this article. Furthermore, we want to thank Christof Weinhardt and Alexander Mädche for their critical comments as well as Ryan Grabowski for proof reading. Lastly, we would like to express our thanks the anonymous reviewers.
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