What most influences consumers’ intention to use? Different motivation and trust stories for uber, airbnb, and taskrabbit

ABSTRACT

While many factors drive the sharing economy’s growth, trust and motivations play critical roles. However, which factors are more important to young consumers? This research compares a trust model with a motivation model for predicting intention to use Airbnb, Uber, and TaskRabbit, comparing within each platform, not between them. The study uses a survey sample of Midwest United States business undergraduates (nearly all Generation Z). Each sample varies in experience levels: relatively high experience Uber respondents, very low experience TaskRabbit respondents, and medium experience for Airbnb. Results show that within Uber, the trust model predicts significantly better than the motivation model. Within Airbnb and TaskRabbit, the motivation model predicts only slightly better. By combining the trust and motivation variables into one model by platform, we find differing degrees of complementarity between the trust and motivation variables, with those for Airbnb being the most complementary in terms of predictive power and those for Uber being the least complementary. Within Airbnb and TaskRabbit, combining the trust and motivation models shows the two most significant variables were enjoyment and trusting intention. Within Uber, trusting intention and trusting beliefs in the provider were the most significant. We provide implications and directions for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Sharing economy
• gig economy
• Uber
• Airbnb
• TaskRabbit
• trust
• risk
• motivation
• enjoyment
• convenience
• intention to use

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Fred Rodammer for agreeing to allow us to conduct this study within his course. We would also like to thank Maarten ter Huurne for reviewing an earlier version of this manuscript. We deeply appreciate the many helpful comments and suggestions of the reviewers and editors of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. These projections were generated before the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. During the Covid-19 pandemic, many sharing economy platforms – especially Airbnb – experienced significant reduction in participation and associated revenues (Termperton, 2020). This contraction may have a longer-term impact on the growth of the sharing economy, but its effect is not fully known at this time.

2. TaskRabbit (in some cases) provides a service with some overlap to other services such as Uber Eats and Instacart. It is possible that students may have more familiarity with these alternative services. However, our description of TaskRabbit to them (see Appendix C) does not mention grocery or food delivery, which likely led to differentiation in the users’ minds between TaskRabbit and Instacart/Uber Eats.

3. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this insight and the following one about gamification.