Title: Digital Identity: The Effect of Trust and Reputation Information on User Judgement in the Sharing Economy,
Abstract: The Sharing Economy (SE) is a growing ecosystem focusing on peer-to-peer
enterprise. In the SE the information available to assist individuals (users)
in making decisions focuses predominantly on community generated trust and
reputation information. However, how such information impacts user judgement is
still being understood. To explore such effects, we constructed an artificial
SE accommodation platform where we varied the elements related to hosts'
digital identity, measuring users' perceptions and decisions to interact.
Across three studies, we find that trust and reputation information increases
not only the users' perceived trustworthiness, credibility, and sociability of
hosts, but also the propensity to rent a private room in their home. This
effect is seen when providing users both with complete profiles and profiles
with partial user-selected information. Closer investigations reveal that three
elements relating to the host's digital identity are sufficient to produce such
positive perceptions and increased rental decisions, regardless of which three
elements are presented. Our findings have relevant implications for human
judgment and privacy in the SE, and question its current culture of ever
increasing information-sharing.