Puritan peers or egoistic entrepreneurs? Moral decay in lateral exchange markets

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of LEM participation on moral identity. Lateral exchange markets (LEMs) enable ordinary people to monetize idle personal resources such as cars, homes, gadgets and skills. Despite its champions portraying actors in these exchange as moral citizens of society, recent findings suggest that egoistic motives drive participation. A salient moral identity motivates behaviors that show social sensitivity to others and enable cooperative actions. Given that platform-providing firms rely on users’ cooperative behaviors to facilitate lateral exchange, understanding factors that affect moral identity can have important implications for the success of such business models. Design/methodology/approach In this research, the authors move away from the ideological discourse behind actors’ motivations, to provide a pragmatic explanation of how participation erodes moral identity. The authors apply a social cognitive framework to examine how the environment in LEMs impacts behaviors and personal factors in a recursive fashion. Findings Across two studies, findings reveal that prolonged participation in lateral exchange diminishes the centrality of moral identity to the working self-concept. Moreover, the results show that keeping puritan peers moral has positive business outcomes. This research also discerns a boundary condition that determines when peers remain consistent with their moral compasses. Specifically, when engagement is perceived as effortful, the behavior becomes an informative input in the inference of one’s moral disposition reinforcing moral identity. Originality/value Marketers can use this research to design business models in ways that mitigate the decay of moral identity.

Socio-technological system of sharing economy

“…In understanding the SE phenomenon, researchers focused on what drives consumer to participate in SE taking consumer centric and technologically focused approach and in the process identifying relevant constructs associated with it (Table 5). [Tussyadiah, Pesonen, 2016] -Ownership [Botsman, Rogers, 2010] -Enjoyment [Hamari, Sjöklint, Ukkonen, 2016] -Personal reputation [Anthony, Smith, Williamson, 2009] -Financial rewards [Lee et al, 2018] -Attitude [Johnson, Mun, Chae, 2016] -Consumption utility -The social media [Ikkala, Lampinen, 2015] -Privacy and security issue [Krasnova et al, 2010] -Egoism [Perren, Stewart, Satornino, 2019] -Authenticity [Lundberg, Ziakas, 2018] -Possessiveness, Materialism [Parguel, Lunardo, Benoit-Moreau, 2017] Extrinsic drive -Environmental concern [Zamani, Sandin, Peters, 2017] -Sustainability [Piscicelli, Cooper, Fisher, 2015;Ertz, Leblanc-Proulx, 2018] -Online platform (quality) [Zervas, Proserpio, Byers, 2017] -Availability [Decrop et al, 2018] -Prestige [Boateng, Kosiba, Okoe, 2019] -Contamination [Baek, Oh, 2021] The Table 5 provides an overview of researchers' perspective in dealing with SE phenomenon and investigating it in isolated stance of either consumer centric [Möhlmann, 2015;Tussyadiah, Pesonen, 2016] or technology focused [Lee et al, 2018] or viewing it as a business model [Botsman, 2014] having certain impact on economy.…”

Platform marketplaces: unifying our understanding of lateral exchange markets

“…We contribute a solution to the existing confusion by offering conceptual clarity on the elements of the sharing economy presented by Wirtz et al (2019) while expanding it to include elements found in LEMs (Perren and Kozinets, 2018; Perren et al , 2019) and platform mechanisms (van Dijck et al , 2018). An LEM may be thought of as a marketplace mediated by a digital platform that connects multiple parties to facilitate a transaction (Perren and Kozinets, 2018).…”