Unlocking Online Reputation
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RESEARCH PAPER
Unlocking Online Reputation On the Effectiveness of Cross-Platform Signaling in the Sharing Economy Timm Teubner • Marc T. P. Adam • Florian Hawlitschek
Received: 9 April 2019 / Accepted: 16 September 2019 Ó Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019
Abstract With the ever-growing popularity of sharing economy platforms, complementors increasingly face the challenge to manage their reputation on different platforms. The paper reports the results from an experimental online survey to investigate how and under which conditions online reputation is effective to engender trust across platform boundaries. It shows that (1) cross-platform signaling is in fact a viable strategy to engender trust and that (2) its effectiveness crucially depends on source–target fit. Implications for three stakeholders are discussed. First, platform complementors may benefit from importing reputation, especially when they have just started on a new platform and have not earned on-site reputation yet. The results also show, however, that importing reputation (even if it is excellent) may be detrimental if there occurs a mismatch between source and target and that, hence, fit is of utmost importance. Second, regulatory authorities may consider reputation portability as a means to make platform boundaries more permeable and hence to tackle lock-in
Accepted after two revisions by Dennis Kundisch.
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-019-00620-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. T. Teubner (&) F. Hawlitschek TU Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] T. Teubner Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF), Berlin, Germany M. T. P. Adam School of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW 2308, Australia
effects. Third, platform operators may employ cross-platform signaling as a competitive lever. Keywords Data portability Digital platforms Reputation Sharing economy Signaling theory Trust
1 Introduction Platforms for selling, renting, and servicing have become a popular alternative to conventional e-commerce channels (Van Alstyne et al. 2016; Sundararajan 2016). Services such as Airbnb for accommodation sharing, BlaBlaCar for ride sharing, eBay for commodity exchange, and Uber for on-demand mobility enable the exchange of spare resources among (private) individuals. At its core, a platform connects consumers (or users) to providers (or complementors) of products and services (Eisenmann et al. 2008). Platform-based businesses have raised billions in venture capital and exhibit strong market valuations [e.g., Uber: $69bn; Airbnb: $31bn; (Zijm et al. 2019)], often exceeding those of long-established industry incumbents. Recent studies on annual consumer spending (e.g., €17.2bn for resale goods; €6.6bn for renting accommodation), growth rates (50–100%), and overall market volume within the sharing economy (€570bn until 2025) underpin this developm
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