Building users’ intention to participate in a sharing economy with institutional and calculative mechanisms: an empirical investigation of DiDi in China

ABSTRACT

Although trust is a key factor in overcoming uncertainty and mitigating risk in a sharing economy, we do not have a thorough understanding of how users' trust in service providers develops in this context. This study focuses on drivers enrolled in China’s DiDi platform as the research object and investigates the effects of institutional and calculative mechanisms on their trust and intention to participate in the sharing economy. The empirical results reveal that feedback mechanism, driver protection, and dispute resolution positively affect institution-based trust, and perceived risks and benefits are significantly related to calculative-based trust. Furthermore, institution based trust and calculative-based trust, in turn, promote the driver’s intention to participate in the sharing economy. The study also finds that both institution-based trust and calculative-based trust play mediating roles, and calculative-based trust is more important for drivers.

KEYWORDS:

• Sharing economy
• driver
• institution-based trust
• calculative-based trust
• intention to participate

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 71873047, 71501078], a grant from the National Social Science Fund of China [grant number 19ZDA115], a grant from the Soft Science Foundation of Guangdong Province [grant number 2019A101002099], a grant from the Soft Science Foundation of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of China [grant number RKX2019030B], and a grant from the Special Research Foundation of the Ministry of Education of Guangdong Province [grant number 2020KZDZX1041].

Notes on contributors

Jinyuan Guo

Jinyuan Guo is a doctoral student at the College of Economics and Management, South China Agricultural University. His research focuses on and sharing economy, IT business value and digital business transformation. He has published in International Journal of Information Management.

Jiabao Lin

Jiabao Lin is a Professor at the College of Economics and Management, South China Agricultural University. His research focuses on sharing economy, IT business value and digital business transformation. He has published in Decision Support Systems, Information & Management, International Journal of Information Management, Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, Internet Research, Industrial Management & Data Systems, Journal of Electronic Commerce Research, Information Technology and Management, International Journal of Mobile Communications, Chinese Management Studies and so on. Jiabao Lin is the corresponding author and can be contacted at: [email protected]

Lei Li

Lei Li is a doctoral student at the College of Economics and Management, South China Agricultural University. Her research focuses on sharing economy, IT business value and digital business transformation. She has published in Decision Support Systems, Information & Management, Internet Research, Industrial Management & Data Systems and so on.