Users and potential users of the sharing economy need to place a considerable amount of trust in both the person and the platform with which they are dealing. The consequences of transaction partners’ opportunism may be severe, for example damage to goods or endangered personal safety. Trust is, therefore, a key factor in overcoming uncertainty and mitigating risk. However, there is no thorough overview of how trust is developed in this context. To understand how the trust of users in the sharing economy is influenced, we performed a systematic literature review. After screening, 45 articles were included in a qualitative synthesis in which the results were grouped according to a well‐established trust typology. The results show various antecedents of trust in the sharing economy (e.g. reputation, trust in the platform, and interaction experience) related to multiple entities (i.e. seller, buyer, platform, interpersonal, and transaction). Trust in this economy is often reduced to the use of reputation systems alone. However, our study suggests that trust is much more complex than that and extends beyond reputation. Furthermore, our review clearly shows that research on trust in the sharing economy is still scarce and thus more research is needed to understand how trust is established in this context. Our review is the first that brings together antecedents of trust in online peer‐to‐peer transactions and integrates these findings within an existing framework. Additionally, the study suggests directions for future research in order to advance the understanding of trust in the sharing economy.

Most research on segregation in social networks considers small circles of strong ties, and little is known about segregation among the much larger number of weaker ties. This article proposes a novel approach to the study of these more extended networks, through the use of data on personal ties in an online social network. We illustrate this method’s potential by describing and explaining the degree of ethnic and gender segregation on Facebook among a representative survey of adolescents in the Netherlands ( N = 2,810; ~1.1 million Facebook friends). The results show that large online networks are more strongly segregated by ethnicity than by gender. Drawing on the same survey data, we find that core networks are more segregated in terms of ethnicity and gender than are extended networks. However, an exception to this pattern is personal networks of ethnic majority members, whose core networks are as segregated by ethnicity as their extended networks. Further analysis suggests this exception is due to their larger population size and the ethnic segregation of their social settings. We discuss the implications of these findings for the role of structural opportunities, homophily, and balance.

* We are grateful to Nicolas Christin for providing us with the data and very helpful comments.

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Societies are sometimes divided into groups that behave in different ways or have strongly opposing opinions. At other times, everyone seems to behave according to similar principles and opinions. It is likely that individual decisions on behavior or opinions are affected by social networks through influence and selection processes. However, the outcomes are not necessarily optimal for the society as a whole. Two types of problems might arise: (a) polarization of the society into two camps that do not reach consensus, possibly leading to conflict; (b) actors choosing suboptimal behavior, because changing behavior is too risky if done unilaterally. Simulations show that if a society is rather segregated initially, there exists a heightened probability that this situation will worsen. The effect of network density is twofold. First, density has a positive effect on reaching a uniform opinion and, therefore, decreases the likelihood of polarization. Second, density increases the likelihood that actors do not change their behavior, worsening the inefficiency of already suboptimal initial situations. * We thank Werner Raub, Tom Snijders, Arnout van de Rijt, Gerald Schneider, Thomas Plümper, anonymous journal reviewers, and many seminar participants for their constructive comments.