Study 1: A study on Antecedents and Consequences of Provider’s Trust in Sharing Platforms

For a platform to sustain, effective functioning of both the providers and the consumers is necessary. Trust in the platform and the transacting party has been shown to be of crucial importance right from onboarding to continued engagement, for providers as well as consumers. However, in both practice and academia, consumers’ trust in different targets has been well explored and exploited with a limited focus on providers’ trust (Huurne et al., 2017; Sun, 2010). As the trust formation mechanisms vary for both providers and consumers, findings from consumers’ studies cannot be generalized to the providers (Sun, 2010). The limited studies on providers’ trust in online platforms have been mostly in the context of ecommerce (Guo et al., 2017). The nature and degree of risks in sharing platforms differ from ecommerce. Most sharing instances involves two components- a) an online component and b) an offline component. The online component is where users look for potential peers, analyze the available cues on platform and decide whether to share or not. This component is facilitated by the sharing platforms. The offline component is the one where the actual sharing of resource takes place, where the peers may interact in a physical world. This interaction is beyond the purview of the platform, thus exposing both the parties to a range of risks. Particularly, in this component, providers are highly vulnerable as the chances of risks such as damage to property, theft, vandalism, safety risk, etc. are high. Since consumer’s side is sufficiently focused on the prior literature, we address this limitation by studying the provider’s side in sharing economy platforms. We address the following three research questions for this study.