earticle

영어

The concept of sharing economy has received rich attention in recent years. As a typical type of business model in the sharing economy, online short rent has been paid attention by both industry and academia. In this study, we find trust to be a critical determinant to the success of online short rent platforms. Based on three dimensions of trust theory, i.e., ability, benevolence and integrity, we investigate the factors influencing tenant’ willingness to participate in online short rent. We further examine the extent to which trust can influence the number of sales and comments of rooms listed at online short-term rent platforms, which can represent tenant’ willingness to participate in the sharing economy. The results show that the trust dimensions represented by a landlord’s personal characteristics have significant positive correlations with the number of sales and comments. For example, the real name authentication and the sesame score can represent the trust integrity; online replay ratio and the average confirmation time representing the trust sincerity, and the order acceptance ratio representing the trust ability. On this basis, we proposed some recommendations for both platforms and landlords. For example, the landlords can improve the tenants’ trust by authenticating his/her real name, replying actively and timely. For platforms, when they make housing list ranking rules, they can take the landlord’s personal attributes that may affect trust into consideration. Moreover, platforms can also allow landlords to supply value-added services to improve service quality and ultimately promote the virtuous circle of the platform ecosphere. Through conducting the empirical research on a particular application of the sharing economy, we aim to fill the research gap of this field in China and provide theoretical and practical contributions to the future development of online short rent.