Study On The Formation And Influencing Factors Of Consumer Trust In Sharing Economy

As a new economy that follows the trend of digitalization of human production and life and relies on online virtual platforms,the sharing economy meet people’s needs for diversified,flexible and personalized consumption under the general trend of consumer upgrading.The sharing economy revitalizes idle resources through end-to-end sharing among strangers,and how to establish trust among strangers has become a key issue under this new economic logic.The short-term transfer of usage rights,the non-standardization of shared goods,and the high interactivity of transactions all make the sharing economy have greater information asymmetry than the traditional economy,which makes it easier to induce various kinds of moral risks and create a crisis of trust.For example,in recent years,the frequent outbreak of negative news about hitchhiking has greatly affected consumers’ trust and confidence in the shared travel sector,which has greatly reduced the attractiveness of this business model.Therefore,it is of great theoretical and practical significance to study the formation of trust for the construction of trust and the improvement of consumer confidence.As a subjective consciousness-driven behavior,the formation of trust is a very complex process,going through the stage of trust germination with initial information assessment,the stage of trust belief with emotional tendency,the stage of trust intention with willingness to take risks,and the stage of trust result with the desire to implement relevant behaviors.In different stages,it is also influenced by various factors,which involve not only individual psychology and institutional environment levels,but also network platforms and social norms,which are more complicated for the sharing economy with strong personalized needs and high interactivity.Rational behavior theory can well explain consumers’ decision-making process,and it also has strong explanatory power for trust behavior dominated by subjective consciousness.Therefore,this paper will construct a theoretical framework of trust formation in the sharing economy,and investigates the influencing factors of each stage of trust formation.In particular,the effectiveness of the platform mechanism,the effectiveness of the macro system and their interaction on consumer trust are studied in more detail.The findings of this paper include:(1)Based on rational behavior theory,the formation of consumer trust in the sharing economy can be divided into three stages: trust antecedents,trust process and trust outcomes,which describe the whole process of consumers’ development from trust propensity to trust beliefs,trust intentions and trust-related behaviors.(2)In the antecedent stage of trust,the first thing that influences consumers’ trust is their individual characteristics,mainly including their beliefs about human nature and their own trust stance;secondly,institutional assurance can also promote consumer trust,and there are two dimensions of institutional assurance in the context of the sharing economy,namely,structural assurance of transactions and the normality of transaction scenarios;in addition,as a new industry developed by relying on the Internet platform,the sharing economy platform’s technology,mechanism and service quality and other platform-specific factors also have an important impact on consumer trust.(3)In the trust process stage,consumer trust gradually rises from the perception level to the intention level,in which the group reference provided by social norms plays a key role in transforming consumers’ trust beliefs,which also reflects the social attributes of the sharing economy.(4)In the trust outcome stage,inherent consumption habits are the biggest obstacle to the transformation from trust intention to consumption behavior in the new economy,and this finding also provides an explanation for the "will-behavior" gap.(5)The effectiveness of some platform mechanisms,such as privacy protection mechanism,audit and authentication mechanism,and security mechanism,has a significant contribution to consumer trust,while the macro system has effect on the effectiveness of platform mechanisms.The positive regulating effect is that the macro policies such as laws and regulations provide the basic institutional guarantee for the platform mechanism;the negative regulating effect is that the excessive regulation of the macro system will inhibit the platform mechanism,which is equivalent to replacing the platform-based trust with the system-based trust.(6)The construction of platform trust needs to be carried out in three aspects: controlling the security audit mechanism,improving the performance guarantee mechanism and establishing the dispute resolution mechanism;the government needs to provide assistance to the development of the sharing economy in terms of innovative regulatory models.In summary,the scale and questionnaire design developed for the trust factor can also give a revelation for the empirical study of consumer-related behaviour,and the findings of this paper can also provide some reference for the construction of trust in the sharing economy industry.