This paper considers that information will increase trust. Mayer proposed a model to
figure out factors that have positive influence on trust (Mayer, Davis, & Schoorman,
1995). There are two roles in his model: trustors and trustees. Mayer proposed that a
trustee’s ability, benevolence, integrity will both increase trust, because they will increase
the trustor’s perceived trustworthiness toward the trustee. However, figuring out whether
a trustee has high ability, benevolence, and integrity is a great challenge. Also, while trust
means taking risk (Mayer et al., 1995), when the trustor is unable to judge these factors
of the trustee, the trustor may not be willing to trust due to high potential risk. Therefore,
information plays an important role to increase trust. While the trustor has enough
information to the trustee, the trustor can easily know that whether the trustee has enough
ability, has high benevolence to the trustor, and has high integrity. The information of
these factors can reduce perceived risk to the trustor, thereby increase the trustor’s
willingness to trust. While IT mechanisms grow rapidly, this present research
hypothesizes that the information which provided by UBER’s IT mechanisms can
definitely increase people’s trust on both sharing peer and the platform.
There are two sections below. First, the information which provided by UBER’s IT
mechanisms will be identified, and second, how these information work to increase
passengers’ trust will be discussed.
UBER implements various IT mechanisms to provide information and facilitate
passengers’ trip on picking up services. Before starting a trip on UBER, UBER calculates
and displays the price of the trip in advance, and plans the best route to the destination
for the passenger. When the passenger accepts the price and makes an appointment on
Uber, UBER automatically assigns a driver to the passenger, further provides the driver’s
information and the trip’s information to the passengers. When the passenger finishes his
trip, UBER enables the passenger to write a review and rate for the trip. How these
mechanisms work before the trip, on the trip, and after the trip will be discussed below.
Before the trip, the route to the destination and the price will be displayed. Different
from the mechanisms of traditional taxis, which drivers drive their own route to the
destination and inform passengers of the charge after the trip, Uber lets passengers to
know such information in advance. In addition, the charge and the route is calculated by
the algorithms from Uber, rather than drivers, and usually is the best option to the
passengers. This mechanism provides passengers the possibility to know much more
information and make the decision before the picking up service.
When the passenger accepts the price and makes an appointment on Uber, UBER
assigns a driver for the trip, and provides more information about the driver and the trip.
Uber assigns the driver automatically, including the consideration of the driver’s rating,
the distance between the driver and the passenger, and the willingness of the driver to
pick up the passenger. After the driver is determined, Uber provides the information of
the driver. UBER provides the driver’s personal information, the driver’s reputation
information, and the driving car’s information to the passenger. The driver’s personal
information includes the driver’s real name, photos, his speaking language, and his
history records of driving UBER car. The driver’s reputation information contain the
driver’s average rating, and every passengers’ reviews to him. The driving car’s
information includes the car’s license plate number, the type, and which company the car
is rented from. In addition, while it needs time for the driver to arrive to the place where
the passenger stands, UBER will show the instant location of the driver, and this lets the
passenger knows the distance between the driver and himself. After the passenger gets in
the car, UBER will use GPS to keep monitoring their location, and keep the driver from
driving deviated from the route scheduled by UBER. This makes sure the driver pick off
the passenger at the right destination and at right time. These information provide
passengers to have clearer expectations of the trip during the process of using UBER
service.
And after finishing the trip, the reviews and ratings have considerable impact on
UBER platform. As mentioned above, after passengers rate and comment drivers, these
information will be updated to the drivers’ profile, and other passengers will regard it as
a reference of the drivers’ performance. Also, the rating score will be checked by UBER
regularly. If a driver’s rating score is too low (ex: less than 3 stars), his UBER account
will be prohibited by UBER for a period of time. Hence, this makes that only if a driver’s
rating score is high enough will be shown on UBER’s map for passenger’s appointment.
While the information which UBER discloses are listed systematically, the next
section is to illustrate how they can increase passengers’ trust on the company(Uber), and
the sharing peer(the driver) as well. First, this paper will discuss how these information
can increase passengers’ trust on Uber, and later it will also discuss how these information
can increase passengers’ trust on the driver.
This paper posits that these information can increase passengers’ trust on Uber
through increasing passengers’ perception on Uber’s ability, integrity, and benevolence,
which are three factors that can increase the trustee’s trustworthiness.
First, these information show that Uber has enough ability to handle this trip. While
lots of information of the driver and the trip are provided by Uber to the passenger, UBER
persuades passengers that Uber would have the ability to know all the details of the trip,
further delivers the message that UBER can control and participate the whole process of
the trip. For example, the trip is continuously been monitored by GPS, and the route is
always been recorded. While the passenger’s instant location is always shown on the APP
when s/he is on the UBER car during the trip, the passenger would be persuaded that
UBER tries to make sure the car would always follow the assigned route to the destination.
Besides, the passenger would know that once the driver does something harmful to the
passenger, the driver cannot escape because UBER can immediately provide the location
information to the police. In addition, UBER persuades the passenger that they can
maintain the service quality by prohibiting drivers whose rating score are less than three
stars from providing services. These mechanisms show that UBER has huge controlling
power. Even though passengers get on strangers’ car, UBER still provide users enough
information to evaluate the capability of the drivers.
Second, the transparency of information delivers the message to the passenger that
UBER has high integrity. While Uber provide information to the passengers as more as
they can, it means that UBER is responsible for the trip. At past, when passengers take
taxis and face bad services, they can hardly do reactions because there is no one to
complain to after getting off the car. However, while UBER provide information of the
driver and the trip to passengers, passengers are more able to complain about the trip.
UBER would become the target to complain and ask for compensation, and passengers
are able to point out the driver and the car which provided bad services. Further,
passengers can literally react through rating and reviewing for the bad experience they
faced. Therefore, passengers would feel that UBER would be responsible for the trip due
to the information disclosure, and increase their perception of integrity on UBER.
Third, this paper considers that the disclosure of information in advance, especially
the sensitive information including the price, can persuade passengers to regard Uber as
a company that really think of them. Different with the taxis’ policy that they always show
the price after the trip, and passengers have no rights to refuse to pay the price, Uber gives
the passengers the rights to decide whether to accept the price for the service or not in
advance. While passengers can know more critical information before being charged, they
will more believe that Uber does consider of their perspective and provide a fair sharing
process.
Thus, this study adopts the concept of information quality (Bock, Lee, Kuan, & Kim,
2012), and proposes that the increasing of information quality will leads to the increasing
of people’s trust of the sharing economy platform. According to Bock’s theory, while
information is regarded as high quality, it is because the information is sufficient, accurate,
timely, and helpful. In this case, people can have higher perception of drivers’
benevolence, integrity, and competence only when the information UBER provide is
sufficient, accurate, timely, and helpful to them. With high quality information, peoples
will be more able to judge whether the trustee is trustworthiness. Therefore, the
hypothesis is raised below,
H1: Information quality has a positive influence on people’s trust of the sharing economy company.
Also, this paper posits that these information can increase the passenger’s trust on
the driver. While information is important to the trustor (the passenger) to judge whether
the trustee (the driver) is trustworthy, especially when the trustor and the trustee are
strangers before, the trustor tends to seek information of the trustee for his judgement. It
is not easy for the trustor to seek the trustee’s information in the past. However, with the
development of technologies, the mechanisms of UBER nowadays can provide such
information to the trustor’s needs, which is unable for the trustor to collect before. The
difference of information collecting between the past and the present will be described
below.
At past, there are little ways for the trustor to fetch the trustee’s information and
increase trust on the trustee, especially when the trustor and the trustee are strangers. The
trustor can only rely on a third-party to fetch information. Under this situation, Burt
proposed a model to interpret how information travel in a social network, further trigger
reputation mechanisms and increase members’ trust (Burt, 2007). In his theory, people
would care about their own reputation. This cause people suffering reputation cost if they
do something inappropriately because the information of one’s bad reputation would
travel through the indirectly mutual contacts in a network. Hence, based on this rationale,
people tend to behave well to maintain their reputation well, and cause trust become less
risky in the network (Burt, 2007). However, this mechanism would only happens under
specific conditions.
In Burt’s theory, the reputation mechanism would happen only when the social
network is close enough to create reputation stability, and is hard to escape. Burt used the
phenomenon of the investment bank industry and an Indian small village called Jati for
explanation respectively. First he used the phenomenon of the investment bank industry
to conclude that the closure is an essential element of creating reputation stability. There
are mainly two roles working in investment banks, bankers and analysts. In each year,
there are peer reviews between people who had cooperated with each other in the past
year. Through the accumulated data of their peer evaluations, Burt found that only when
the colleagues were strongly connected in the network, the evaluations became stable
(Burt, 2007). He considered that this is because when the network is close, good works
of a person would be remembered by colleagues in the network, and the one’s reputation
would continue over time. However, when the evaluating colleagues were not connected,
good works and bad works would easily be forgotten, further led the evaluations became
unstable. People would not care so much about reputation while it reset each year because
nobody remembered their behavior. Thus, creating a close network would definitely
protect stability. Second, the transformation of the Indian village Jati demonstrated that a
network should be hard to escape to protect reputation mechanism works. Before, the rule
in Jati is that members are not allowed to marry outside the village, and people can only
find their jobs by other members’ referral. At that time, reputation was strongly credible
because the direct or indirect link tie closely through the rules of marriage and finding
jobs. This improved information flow to make sure the members of the network follow
their social obligations (Burt, 2007). However, when time past, when the members started
to establish connections outside the village, the community network became eroded.
People got married outside the Jati, and parents were encouraged to move their children
to English-language school to make their children be able to compete desired jobs. This
made people not so rely on the network in Jati before, because they have ways to escape
outside the obligation of Jati. At this moment, the reputation mechanism became hard to
continue in Jati. Hence, creating a close and hard-to-escape network is essential to make
sure reputation stability. But it should also be noticed, fulfilling these requirements are
cost-consuming in the past, just like the investment banks establish the peer evaluating
mechanism for years, and Jati used hundreds of years to implement the rule of marriage.
Nowadays UBER uses IT mechanisms which can facilitate information sharing to
save the cost of building trust between peers. As mentioned before, UBER builds the
mechanism which drivers and passengers can rate and write reviews for each other after
the service is completed. Actually, it exactly creates a more efficient way to cultivate trust.
It remarkably increase the trustor’s perception of the trustee’s ability, integrity, and
benevolence, further increase the trustworthiness of the trustee.
First, this research proposes that the information which provided by UBER’s IT
mechanisms can strongly raise the driver’s willingness of being benevolent to the
passenger, further increase the passenger’s perception of the driver’s benevolence.
This research considers that the reason why the driver would tend to be benevolent
is because the driver cares about his reputation on UBER’s review and rating system,
which means the reputation mechanism works on the system. In Burt’s theory, he
proposed that the members in the network should be close because of the consideration
of information flow. However, the passenger can directly find out the driver’s past
behavior through the reviews and ratings on the system, instead of figuring out indirectly
through their mutual contacts, and this keeps reputation mechanism stable. Secondly, all
the data of drivers’ reviews and ratings are accumulated on the system, which makes
UBER drivers impossible to escape from the evaluation. When an individual just drives
a taxi, actually he doesn’t really need to care about his reputation. This is because the
previous passenger would almost has no connection with the next passenger, which
allows the driver to escape from having reputation cost even he does impropriate
behaviors. In contrast, each trip would be evaluated on UBER and be explored by others,
so when a driver provides a service which is not good enough, he has to bear the result of
receiving bad evaluation, and this would instantly reflect on his personal score that
appears on the system. And certainly, passengers will never take a driver’s car who has
low score which directly cause the driver has less income in the future. Hence, the
reputation is worthy because reputation cost is literally existed and unescapable, and this
is why reputation mechanism works on the system.
While drivers would care about their evaluation because of the reputation mechanism,
passengers would tend to perceive the benevolence of drivers. In the context that all the
drivers are evaluated by passengers, drivers tend to behave well and provide good services
in order to gain higher scores. Accordingly, passengers would know that their evaluation
to drivers are effective. Thus, when passengers know that drivers would do their best to
get higher evaluations from them, it means that passengers would perceive high
benevolence from drivers because of the evaluating system.
Second, information can increase the transparency of the driver’s ability and integrity.
While the historical ratings and reviews and the personal information of the driver are
shown to the passenger on the network, passengers can comprehensively speculate the
driver’s upcoming serving behaviors through these information. For example, the
passenger will consider the driver is competent when the driver has enough serving
experiences recorded on the system, which means the passenger recognizes the driver has
enough ability to provide the service. Also, when the passenger see positive comments of
the driver written by previous passengers, the passenger would consider the driver has
good reputation, which means the driver’s integrity is recognized. Hence, the trustor’s
ability and integrity are much more easily to express to the trustee than before in this
network, because the system would remember each previous behaviors, and publish all
of them for the trustee’s future judgement.
To sum up, while the review and rating system raises passengers perception on
drivers’ ability, integrity, and benevolence, this research consider it is exactly because of
its high quality information that truly helps passengers for judgment of the trustworthiness
of the drivers. Therefore, this research develops the hypothesis below:
H2: Information quality has a positive influence on people’s trust of the sharing peer.
This research posits that information can increase people’s trust on the sharing peer
through a special kind of trust called institutional-based trust. Institution-based trust is
based on third-party structures (Pavlou & Gefen, 2004). While two people have to share
and be shared with the other one, and there is no previous interaction between them, a
third party will be helpful. A third party would create a structure which can make an
environment feel trustworthy (McKnight, Choudhury, & Kacmar, 2002). Two people
would trust each other and start their sharing activity based on both of their trust on the
third party institution, which is independent of the dyadic action. Therefore, this research
considers that while information have a positive influence on people’s trust of the sharing
economy platform, these kind of information can also increase people’s trust of the
sharing peer through the effect of institutional-based trust, that causes the trust on the
platform become the mediator between the information quality and the trust on the sharing
peer. The hypothesis is below,
H3: Information quality which can facilitate information sharing has a positive influence on people’s trust of the sharing peer through the mediation effect of trust on the sharing economy platform.
After arguing that information will increase people’s trust towards sharing peers and
the sharing economy platform, this research would further propose that these information
will increase people’s participating intention of sharing economy platform by the
mediation effect of trust. Trust is a subjective feeling that the trustee will behave in a
mediation effect of trust. Trust is a subjective feeling that the trustee will behave in a