The Role of Ethical Perceptions in Consumers’ Participation and Value Co-creation on Sharing Economy Platforms

Abstract

Consumers' participation on sharing economy platforms is crucial for the success of the products, services, and companies on those platforms. The participation of consumers enables companies to not only exist, but also to create value for consumers. The sharing economy has witnessed enormous growth in recent years and consumers' concerns regarding the ethics surrounding these platforms have also risen considerably. The vast majority of the previous research on this topic is either conceptual and focused on organizational aspects, or only discusses privacy and security issues, thus providing a very limited scope of discussion. Therefore, drawing on the marketing and business ethics literature, the present study takes into account a multidimensional view of ethical issues surrounding consumers' participation on sharing economy platforms. Findings reveal that privacy, security, shared value, fulfillment/reliability and service recovery are the strongest determinants of consumers' ethical perceptions. These aspects strongly predict the consumers' value co-creation intentions. Consumers' participation also predicts their intention to engage in co-creating value, but this effect is stronger with the mediating role of the consumer's ethical perceptions. The theoretical and managerial implications are also discussed.

Young Consumers’ Intention to Participate in the Sharing Economy: An Integrated Model

“…The model by Yang, Lee, Lee, and Koo [80] included trust, reputation, and security, among other variables. Whereas Nadeem, Juntunen, Hajli, and Tajuidi [81] presented their causal model taking into account ethical perceptions and their influence on consumers' participation and intention to co-create. Gupta, Esmaeilzadeh, Uz, and Tennant [78] took culture into account, while Davlembayeva, Papagiannidis, and Alamanos [82] included social factors in their causal model, and Nadeem and Al-Imamy [83] focused on the role of ethics.…”

Research directions for sharing economy issues

“…Sundararajan, 2013Sundararajan, , 2016. 6 Another facet is value co-creation, involving consumers who help the sharing platform intermediary to enforce rules that maintain order with asset sharing (like for bicycles) via user trust and reciprocity (Lan et al, 2017), ethical participation of consumers (Nadeem et al, 2020), and intention to continue to use the same sharing service (Shao et al, 2020).…”

“…A key concern in this context is to engineer sharing platforms so they can implement highly robust and cost-effective reputation systems, to identify and screen out fake or biased reviews from platform participants and strengthen their information security. The latter is to ensure that their data are not hacked or compromised in ways that will affect consumers' willingness-to-pay and their estimation of the expected value of platform transactions and exchanges (Tadelis, 2016;Nadeem et al, 2020).…”

The Relevance of Digital Sharing Business Models for Sustainability

“…It can be viewed as a new use case of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), a use case which could play a significant role in the necessary transformation towards sustainability. Most importantly, in its Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) models, the DSE has created a new culture of sharing [2,3] whereby individuals engage with different motivations for sharing. Individuals collaborate with their peers in organising access to resources rather than being purely dependent on services from businesses in the conventional market (also called "pipeline businesses" [4,5]) [1].…”