Collaborative trust: The two-way process of building trust within the sharing economy

Many new Internet start-ups have been introduced during the last few years, which allow users to share their underused goods, spaces or services with each other. Besides the fact that this puts capitalistic notions about consumption and ownership in a different perspective, it also raises questions about how trust relations can be established between two participants on a specific sharing platform. This thesis explores the functionality of trust within the online sharing practice, and looks specifically at the role online companies play in order to build trust relationships. In doing so, literature on trust in a broad sense will be discussed, whereby trust in a business-to-consumer context, a business-to-business context and from an e-commerce point-of-view serve as the building blocks for the development of a new conceptual trust model, which is specifically dedicated to the online sharing economy practice. Throughout this master thesis this model will be further explored by means of qualitative research (in-depth interviews and content analysis) of eleven different cases. In the end this study aims to explore the rationales and explanations of the decisions sharing services take when it comes to their trust management, in order to get an overview of how different companies within this relatively new and premature industry operate. By making comparisons between the different services, based on the nature of the sharing activity they practice (product-sharing or service-sharing), it appears that there cannot be drawn any hard conclusions based on this. However, it becomes clear that these cases need to be considered individually. Furthermore, this thesis discovers a correlation between the state or size of an online sharing and the way it handles with consumer trust. Examples include the possibility of insurance, the level of customer service and user interference, and the facilitation of a secured payment environment.