How economic system justification shapes demand for peer‐to‐peer providers

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed steady growth in peer-topeer (P2P) exchanges, which are set to reach $335 billion in revenue by 2025 (Price Waterhouse Coopers, 2015). P2P exchanges enable private individuals to share their resources by offering goods and services to other peers (Chung et al., 2022;Pino et al., 2022). In today's technology-mediated sharing economy, such exchanges often occur on online platforms (such as Airbnb) and pose a viable alternative to traditional commercial exchanges in many domains (Wirtz et al., 2019). However, the appeal of P2P exchanges may vary owing to factors such as limited regulation governing them (Ma et al., 2022). This has led to calls for research on the drivers of consumer demand for P2P exchanges and providers (Mai et al., 2020;Nie et al., 2022).The present research examines how consumers' economic system justification (ESJ) beliefs shape demand for P2P providers. ESJ denotes individuals' tendency to justify the existing economic system because it offers everyone an opportunity to succeed (Jost & Banaji, 1994;Jost & Thompson, 2000). Individuals high in ESJ believe that the economic system is fair because everyone has a chance to succeed and earns their high or low economic position; in contrast, individuals low in ESJ believe the system is unfair because everyone works hard, but many fail through no fault of their own (Goudarzi et al., 2020). Extant consumer research on P2P exchanges examines the role of interpersonal factors such as empathy (Costello & Reczek, 2020;Lamberton & Rose, 2012) and traits such as intelligence (Aspara & Wittkowski, 2019) in shaping P2P demand, but it overlooks the role of ideological beliefs. Yet, in this era of rising economic inequality, beliefs