Repairing the trust in ride-sharing after security incidents

A rash of security incidents in ride-sharing have made discovering the mechanisms to repair consumers' trust essential for the information technology (IT)-enabled ride-sharing platforms. The purpose of this paper is to explore how the two response strategies (i.e. security policies [SPs] and apologies) of platforms repair passengers' trust and whether the two implementation approaches of SPs (i.e. pull and push) lead to different results in repairing passengers' trust in the platforms.

A field survey based on a real scenario (n = 238) and an experiment (n = 245) were conducted to test the hypotheses empirically. Structural equation modeling and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) are employed in the data analyses.

This study finds that (1) both SPs and apologies aid in repairing trust; (2) repaired trust fully mediates the influence of SPs on continuance usage and partially mediates the influence of apologies on continuance usage; (3) security polices and the three dimensions of apologies play different roles in repairing trust and retaining passengers and (4) both pull-based and push-based SPs can repair the violated trust; however, the effect of the pull approach is greater than that of the push approach.

The findings provide guidelines for ride-sharing platforms in taking appropriate actions to repair users' trust after security incidents.

The findings reveal the mechanism of trust repairing in the fields of ride-sharing and extend the contents of the trust theory and pull–push theory.