Abstract
Successful peer-to-peer sharing platforms open the door to new markets by relying on feedback-driven reputation mechanisms to reduce transactions costs. In particular, the reputation-based mechanisms go a long way towards reducing informational asymmetries and opportunistic behavior. Nevertheless, they are not 100 % impervious to abuse. The challenge for ICTs is to further boost trust by reducing risk while keeping transaction costs small. This can be achieved with the help of two complementary approaches: (1) develop ID verification solutions that link and aggregate a user’s reputation profiles from various communities and (2) use connected monitoring devices. Both approaches raise privacy concerns that must be taken into account. This pedagogical note offers a short primer on some of the underlying economic concepts.
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Notes
- 1.
Botsman [3] proposes a definition that also includes ethical criteria, such as “transparency, humanness, and authenticity”.
- 2.
One might argue that Wikipedia could opt to restrict access to paying subscribers (or to those willing to watch ads); this would, however, most likely upset its business model and negatively affect the goodwill of its countless contributors.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank Nabil Georges Badr, Antoine Harfouche, Kirsten Ralf, Alexandre Sokic, ICTO 2015 participants, and an anonymous referee for valuable comments.
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Dakhlia, S., Davila, A., Cumbie, B. (2016). Trust, but Verify: The Role of ICTs in the Sharing Economy. In: Ricciardi, F., Harfouche, A. (eds) Information and Communication Technologies in Organizations and Society. Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation, vol 15. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28907-6_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28907-6_20
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