How Digital Trust Powers the Sharing Economy PDF

For the exclusive use of A. Ahmad, 2024. IIR165 ISSUE 30 THIRD QUARTER 2016 How Digital Trust Powers the Sharing Economy The Digitization of Trust Frédéric Mazzella Arun Sundararajan, Verena Butt D’Espous Mareike Möhlmann This article is part of IESE Insight Review, issue 30, third quarter 2016. DOI:10.15581/00.ART-2887. Copyright © IESE Business School, 2016. All rights reserved Articles and back issues can be purchased on the web at www.iesep.com To reproduce or transmit one or more IESE Insight by electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying or archiving in any information storage or retrieval system) requires written permission. Ask for permission writing us to [email protected] Posting of full-text IESE Insight articles on openly accessible Internet sites is prohibited. To obtain permission to post articles on secured and/or password-protected intranet sites, write your request to [email protected] IESE Business School - UniversiTYOF Navarra / www.ieseinsight.com This document is authorized for use only by Ahmad Ahmad in Spring 24 BA 3500 MIS taught by Evelyn Odonkor, American University In Paris from Jan 2024 to May 2024. For the exclusive use of A. Ahmad, 2024. DEEP insight THE DIGITIZATION OF TRUST How Digital Trust Powers the Sharing Economy By FRÉDÉRIC MAZZELLA, ARUN SUNDARARAJAN, VERENA BUTT D’ESPOUS and MAREIKE MÖHLMANN “D on’t accept a ride from a stranger!” Remember that advice? Today, ride-sharing business models are turning that advice on its head. A variety of peer-to-peer marketplaces are enabling human exchanges on a scale unimaginable before, unlocking a massive, untapped potential for collaboration. The key building block of society – interpersonal trust – is being transformed from a scarce resource into an abundant one. Most strikingly, our research into trust in the sharing economy 24 THIRD QUARTER 2016 ISSUE 30 ﬁnds that people who avail themselves of such services are becoming inclined to trust the person giving them a ride not as “a stranger” but as a friend. This article shares some ﬁndings from an ongoing, independent, non-commercial research collaboration between New York University and BlaBlaCar, the France-based platform available on three continents that matches empty car seats with passengers looking for a long-distance ride. Based on the responses of 18,289 BlaBlaCar members surveyed across 11 European countries https://dx.doi.org/10.15581/002.ART-2887 IESEinsight This document is authorized for use only by Ahmad Ahmad in Spring 24 BA 3500 MIS taught by Evelyn Odonkor, American University In Paris from Jan 2024 to May 2024. For the exclusive use of A. Ahmad, 2024. How Digital Trust Powers the Sharing Economy (France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Ukraine and the United Kingdom), we identify the mechanics of online trust and the resulting levels of trust created. We show that, if given the right digital tools, individuals are able to achieve signiﬁcant levels of trust without ever having met in person. We believe this signals the start of an economic and social revolution, wherein strangers become peers, moving the world toward a new era of trust – friendlier, more personal, more connected and, eventually, more empowering to the individual. What Is Trust? What exactly is trust? In many ways, the answer depends on the context. Trust in a romantic relationship means something diﬀerent from trust in a commercial transaction. A particularly useful deﬁnition in the context of the sharing economy comes from sociologist James Coleman, who has defined trust as a “willingness to commit to a collaborative eﬀort before you know how the other person will behave.” Establishing trust depends on a multiplicity of dimensions. In a non-face-to-face (and sometimes face-to-face) setting, it ﬁrst involves establishing authenticity. Is this person real? Are they who they say they are? Second, it involves assessing intentions. Do these folks have good EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Over the centuries, each signiﬁcant economic expansion has been enabled by the accompanying creation of new trust systems – from villagebased trade and informal trader networks, through contracts, government standards and ﬁnancial institutions, to today’s corporate brands. Emerging digital platforms are catalyzing a new expansion that will reintegrate into our economic interactions the social aspects of commerce that were marginalized by 20th century capitalism, creating a new form of crowd-based capitalism powered by the IESEinsight digital trust grid. This article shares the ﬁndings of an ongoing research collaboration between New York University and BlaBlaCar. The authors identify the mechanics of online trust and the resulting level of trust created. They show that, with the right digital tools, many of which are encapsulated in their DREAMS framework, individuals can achieve high levels of trust without ever having met in person. This signals a radical move toward a friendlier, more personal, more connected, more empowered world of trust. intentions or are they looking to rob me? Third, it involves assessing expertise or quality. Is this person a good plumber? Are these people truthfully representing how interesting their neighborhood is? Are they polite? Is that living room as airy as it looks? Does the car have as much legroom as the photo indicates? For some interactions, verifying that a person is good at what he or she does might be a primary consideration if, for example, you are hiring someone to paint your fence. For other high-stakes interactions, like getting a ride from a stranger, intentions may matter more than expertise: you are probably more interested that the person isn’t a criminal. For still other higher stakes interactions, like hiring a babysitter, you would want to be satisﬁed with all three dimensions: some guarantee that the person is authentic and has good intentions, and that the person actually knows what he or she is doing. If you interact repeatedly with someone, you start to learn about these aspects over time. In short, trust is the leap of faith without which little human collaboration can exist. It has allowed mankind to overcome its limits and to cooperate with one another. It is at the heart of any social system, whether families or businesses, and central to any social construct, from money and ownership to citizenship and democracy. It is the glue that holds our world together. However, when you are trying to transact with a semi-anonymous peer, and for the ﬁrst time, how do you verify identities, intentions and capabilities? Let’s look at the diﬀerent ways in which human beings have accomplished this in the past. The Evolving History of Trust Until recently, an individual’s network of trust was restricted. For thousands of years, trust was limited to close circles of family and friends. One’s reputation in a community, typically a village, was the indicator people relied on to decide whether or not to collaborate with each other. A fascinating study of medieval trade practices by Stanford’s Avner Greif reveals how people used to establish trust when communication channels and systems were weak, limited or absent. In the 11th century, it was more proﬁtable for Mediterranean traders if they could ship their goods without actually having to travel with them. But for this to work, they needed to ISSUE 30 THIRD QUARTER 2016 25 This document is authorized for use only by Ahmad Ahmad in Spring 24 BA 3500 MIS taught by Evelyn Odonkor, American University In Paris from Jan 2024 to May 2024. For the exclusive use of A. Ahmad, 2024. How Digital Trust Powers the Sharing Economy establish a relationship with an overseas agent – someone they trusted enough to accept and distribute the goods at the other end and not rip them oﬀ in the process. How did these early merchants do it? Greif suggests that a combination of reputation and self-interest created the trust provisions that would govern the behavior of overseas agents. First, the traders paid the agents a wage greater than any available elsewhere. This “premium” served a purpose: shrewd agents realized they would be better oﬀ in the long run if they were honest, rather than risk the loss of future proﬁt by stealing for the sake of making a fast buck. Second, the merchants and agents formed coalitions whose members agreed not to employ anyone who had been caught stealing from other members. In other words, economic advantages were created based on community trust and community enforcement. Within this medieval trading model we ﬁnd two ingredients relevant to today’s emerging sharing economy. First, trust was built by creating a situation where one’s reputation mattered. Second, trust was built by creating communities of shared interest that connected reputation to economic self-interest. As these two ingredients became better understood, other ways of regulating exchanges ABOUT THE AUTHORS Frédéric Mazzella is Founder and CEO of BlaBlaCar. Before that, he worked at NASA (USA) and NTT (Japan). He holds an MBA from INSEAD, a master’s in Computer Science from Stanford and a master’s in Physics from the École Normale Supérieure. Verena Butt d’Espous spent 10 years working in sustainable ﬁnance before joining BlaBlaCar in 2014 to do Corporate Communications. She holds an MBA from INSEAD and a BSc in Government and Economics from the London School of Economics. Arun Sundararajan is Professor and Rosen Faculty Fellow at New York University’s Stern School of Business, and author of The Sharing Economy. He has published over 50 scientiﬁc papers, won numerous Best Paper awards and advises governments around the world about digital policy. Mareike Möhlmann is a research scientist at NYU Stern. Her work at NYU is funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. She holds a doctorate from the University of Hamburg and an MSc from the London School of Economics. 26 THIRD QUARTER 2016 ISSUE 30 evolved. The property rights we take for granted in most modern economies today (and which have their roots in English common law) are an example. Trust was scaled by shifting it to governments and other institutions that formalized the rules of engagement and centralized some of the systems needed to organize society. Regulations and contracting, supported by legal and ﬁnancial institutions, allowed people to trade beyond their immediate circle of trust. The emergence of banks eased economic exchanges between strangers who did not need to share any trust-facilitating social ties. All these factors expanded trade possibilities and fostered economic growth, which, together with the development of transport and information technologies, led to the emergence of corporations. Businesses moved from smallscale shops with a well-known customer base to larger scale organizations catering to the needs of a much broader audience in a competitive marketplace. By the end of the 20th century, trust had scaled globally, not only through institutions but also through brands. Today, a significant amount of trust is facilitated by using the brand to convey values, qualitative attributes and, most important, the promise of current and future reliability. Consider food safety: you might feel safer drinking a Pepsi in a country whose food safety laws you aren’t clear about because you trust the brand itself. Government regulation, combined with recognizable brands that comply with the regulation in order to provide a consistently high-quality, safe experience for long-term proﬁt motives, is the foundation of trust in most Western economies today. Time to Change the Rules If these mechanisms have served us well thus far, why would we want to alter the rules of the game? Well, changing the basis for trust expands society’s possibilities in a variety of ways. For one thing, relying on contracts to build trust requires a reasonable level of scale for each transaction. Writing a contract is costly, even if it is a blockchain-based smart contract. So is hiring a lawyer. This makes sense when you are a business buying millions of dollars’ worth of parts. For accommodation related to a two-night stay in Paris, it seems like excessive overhead. IESEinsight This document is authorized for use only by Ahmad Ahmad in Spring 24 BA 3500 MIS taught by Evelyn Odonkor, American University In Paris from Jan 2024 to May 2024. For the exclusive use of A. Ahmad, 2024. How Digital Trust Powers the Sharing Economy The D.R.E.A.M.S. Framework by BlaBlaCar Online trust on peer-to-peer platforms is created through a combination of the following six pillars. D| DECLARED. Declared infor- mation is the foundation of a trusted online proﬁle. It is the information that is volunteered by the user, telling the community a bit more about themselves. No one trusts a complete stranger, so this is the ﬁrst essential step in moving away from anonymity toward online trust. Members can declare their name, age, preferences and give a description of themselves in their own words. RATED. Ratings allow for the aggregation of feedback from objective third parties. Ratings have been largely democratized by online services like eBay or TripAdvisor, but collaborative platforms ask users to rate one another after having shared higher-stakes, real-life, offline experiences. This enables people to build valuable peer-reviewed reputations and create interpersonal trust in a community. R| ENGAGED. In order to feel com- E| pletely comfortable transacting with a fellow user of a sharing service, you need to believe that the other party is fully engaged and will honor their commitment. Collaborative platforms that allow members to commit ﬁnancially to a transaction ahead of the experience, via a pre-payment service, create trust through engagement. This is the sole parameter that is geared toward future interaction. It links past information to future commitment. ACTIVE. Members of a collab- A| orative service depend on each other to provide the goods or service to which the platform is dedicated. That’s why it’s vital to enable a reactive exchange between them, ensuring that the transaction progresses smoothly from initial interest to realization. To do this, information about the level and frequency of a user’s activity must be provided to the other Moreover, government-led solutions were best suited for a slow-moving industrial era: zoning ensured that industrial plants didn’t disrupt residential neighborhoods; taxi metering prevented cabbies from ripping passengers oﬀ. But in a post-industrial and information age, the old institutional constraints are inadequate and, indeed, often no longer apply to the new trust-exchange models that are emerging. Digital infrastructures are reducing the need for governments to intervene and police individual exchanges. The rating system that eBay pioneered in the 1990s proved that customers could eﬀectively police themselves. If you win a bid on eBay and the product turns up as expected, you are more likely to use eBay again. If you have a good experience with a speciﬁc provider, IESEinsight party in a transaction – for example, publishing the number of rides and including statements such as, “Laura will aim to reply within three hours.” MODERATED. All information transferred by users of a sharing service must be third-party veriﬁed, whether this is the veriﬁcation of contact or bank details or the approval of user-generated content. Users need to know that everything they see online meets a required level of goodwill and authenticity, as ensured by the third party providing the sharing platform. M| SOCIAL. Social networks allow S| users to connect their identity with their existing online identity, be it socially via Facebook or professionally via LinkedIn. Connecting a proﬁle with other existing social networks will allow a person to leverage their existing online presence to create trust. you are especially likely to buy from him or her again. A seller who consistently fails to deliver products will get bad reviews. The same holds true for bidders who never actually complete their transactions. When these experiences get digitized and made publicly available through an online reputation system, your ability to trust people you don’t know is enhanced. Twenty years’ worth of experience of using feedbackbased reputation systems like eBay’s has given us a fairly deep understanding of their potential, and prepares us to trust other such platforms. Further evidence that virtual tools may do a better job at building trust than the old ones is their ability to address the shortcomings and failures of “physical world” exchanges. For example, if a taxi driver systematically refuses to ISSUE 30 THIRD QUARTER 2016 27 This document is authorized for use only by Ahmad Ahmad in Spring 24 BA 3500 MIS taught by Evelyn Odonkor, American University In Paris from Jan 2024 to May 2024. For the exclusive use of A. Ahmad, 2024. How Digital Trust Powers the Sharing Economy With the spread of mobile connectivity, we are only at the beginning of a profound behavioral shift. Our potential to collaborate and create value has never been so immense. pick up passengers of a particular ethnicity, it is hard to identify and deal with that using traditional means. However, if an Uber driver does the same, the ensuing data trail makes it easier to spot and correct. This aﬀords new opportunities to right old wrongs. In some ways, we may be returning to the community enforcement methods that predated governmental intervention, more in line with the 11th century Mediterranean traders. The Digitization of Trust Today, the sharing economy has us trusting each other at levels that are really quite surprising. As Jason Tanz wrote in his 2014 Wired magazine cover story: “Many of these companies have us engaging in behaviors that would have seemed unthinkably foolhardy as recently as ﬁve years ago. We are hopping into strangers’ cars (Lyft, Sidecar, Uber), welcoming them into our spare rooms (Airbnb), dropping our dogs oﬀ at their houses (DogVacay, Rover) and eating food in their dining rooms (Feastly).” This empowerment of individuals is creating a radical shift away from centralized institutions toward decentralized, more connected peers. In other words, we are moving from a “one-to-many” conﬁguration to a world where trusted interactions can occur on a “many-tomany” basis, changing relationships between economic and social actors along the way, and creating a new “crowd-based” form of capitalism. Thanks to online trust, and freed from the limits of the past, such as time and distance, individuals are empowered to share, rent or exchange goods, knowledge, money, skills, networks and content on an unprecedented scale, unleashing formidable untapped value. Dormant capital can be put to more productive use, generating a wide variety of new consumption experiences. We can now use assets belonging to others without the hassle and cost of ownership. Great opportunities for resource 28 THIRD QUARTER 2016 ISSUE 30 eﬃciency are opening up and creating a wealth of new enriching online and oﬄine social interactions. With 44 percent of the world’s population connected to the internet and with the spread of mobile connectivity, we are only at the beginning of a profound behavioral shift. Our potential to collaborate and create value has never been so immense. As interpersonal trust is transformed into an abundant resource, individuals are becoming their own brands. They build proﬁles and accumulate feedback from multiple one-shot interactions. When aggregated, summarized and made visible to others, this history becomes part of their “trust capital.” Peers can instantly download information about each other to form an opinion on whether or not to trust a speciﬁc individual. The implications of such “digital trust grids” for interpersonal trust can be compared to the breakthrough in communication when the telephone was invented. The phone suddenly enabled people to communicate with anyone instantly. Similarly, digital trust grids allow individuals to download anyone’s trust capital for immediate use. Trust is being disrupted both in its reach and immediacy. As discussed, trust is built by verifying identities, intentions and capabilities. More speciﬁcally, in semi-anonymous internet-based peerto-peer settings, trust stems from at least six cues: from one’s own prior interaction; through familiarity that comes from the nature of exchange being part of the “cultural dialogue”; by learning from the explicit experiences of others; through brand certiﬁcation; by relying on digitized social capital; by relying on digitized forms of real-world identity, and more generally, validation from external institutions or entities, government and non-government, digital and otherwise. IESEinsight This document is authorized for use only by Ahmad Ahmad in Spring 24 BA 3500 MIS taught by Evelyn Odonkor, American University In Paris from Jan 2024 to May 2024. For the exclusive use of A. Ahmad, 2024. How Digital Trust Powers the Sharing Economy Prior interaction, feedback and brand certification had their place in the world of eBay, but digitized social capital, digital identity and robust digital conduits to external validation are more recent developments. Think of social capital as an aggregation of the resources you might have access to on account of a network of relationships (whether friendship, mutual acquaintance or recognition). Such ties give you access to a wide range of resources, now and potentially in the future. If you share friends with someone, you can rely on them more, perhaps because you feel they are “closer” to you or because you know that the shared friendship is likely to deter bad behavior. True, online social networking platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn have enhanced our ability to build new social capital digitally, but this is only a small part of their power in facilitating peer-to-peer exchanges online. What’s most important is that these platforms contain digitized representations of our real-world, physical-world social capital. Making this network of real-world social capital digitally available provides a powerful cue of authenticity, intent and reliability. This was not a source of EXHIBIT 1 High Level of Trust PERCENTAGE OF RESPONDENTS WHO RANKED 4 OR 5 OUT OF 5 THEIR LEVEL OF TRUST IN… 94% Raising Trust Capital Family 92% Friend 88% Member with full proﬁle on BlaBlaCar 58% Colleague 42% Neighbor 16% Social Media Contact IESEinsight trust that eBay’s sellers had access to. But it is a prerequisite for participating in a large number of today’s sharing economy platforms, and raises the stakes of online exchanges with semianonymous peers. Furthermore, trust comes from validation by external institutions not connected to the exchange. A government can certify that you are who you say you are by issuing an oﬃcial ID. Your possession of a mobile number tied to a monthly subscription plan is indicative of authenticity based on the screening process that issuing such accounts involves. A company that conducts a background check can verify that you don’t have a criminal record. Only recently have technologies emerged that allow you to digitize such external forms of validation and make them available as part of your online proﬁle. You can hold your driver’s license or credit card up in front of your webcam, and in a matter of minutes, a service run by Jumio will validate your identity (Airbnb uses this service). Once these real-world forms of validation can be digitized, they add to the trust infrastructure – but, again, by bringing online the cues previously only available in the real world. These trust infrastructures are, by and large, isolated islands. A five-star rating on Uber doesn’t help you get customers on Lyft (although it might be a useful screening device for a competing platform). If you are a good eBay seller, you can’t transfer that reputation to Airbnb or Didi Chuxing; you have to rebuild it starting from scratch. But this may be changing, as our research revealed. To understand the level of trust built within the BlaBlaCar community, we conducted a Europe-wide survey of BlaBlaCar users. Participants were asked what, in their view, was the main role of BlaBlaCar. Out of eight options provided, the top three responses were “connecting people” (74 percent), “creating trust” (63 percent) and “communicating about ridesharing” (57 percent). Indeed, “connecting people” and “creating trust” are fundamental elements in building a reliable environment of collaboration, and are ultimately an online platform’s main reason for being. It is also signiﬁcant that “communicating about ride-sharing” appeared in the top three, ISSUE 30 THIRD QUARTER 2016 29 This document is authorized for use only by Ahmad Ahmad in Spring 24 BA 3500 MIS taught by Evelyn Odonkor, American University In Paris from Jan 2024 to May 2024. For the exclusive use of A. Ahmad, 2024. How Digital Trust Powers the Sharing Economy Two ride-sharers who have never met end up trusting each other more than colleagues who share the same office and meet every day. This finding held true across all countries surveyed. because raising visibility breeds mainstream usage and familiarity, which holds implications for trust. The fact that there are growing numbers of drivers and passengers on BlaBlaCar, with little variation across countries, likely contributed to 70 percent of respondents saying they felt more comfortable about ride-sharing in general. Just as in the real world, familiarity enhances trust in an online world. In order to assess the level of trust in the ride-sharing community, members were asked to rank the trust they placed in a BlaBlaCar member with a full profile relative to the trust they placed in other familiar types of people, ranging from family and friends to strangers. As expected, family and friends were trusted most, followed by colleagues, neighbors, social network contacts and lastly strangers. When a BlaBlaCar member was included in this trust spectrum, those with a full profile ranked just behind friends and ahead of colleagues and neighbors. When measuring specifically who they trusted highly, a striking 88 percent said they highly trusted another BlaBlaCar member with a full profile. This was close to the 92 percent who highly trusted their friends, and significantly higher than the 58 percent who highly trusted their colleagues. This would indicate that, when provided with the right set of tools, users of online platforms are able to recreate a sense of trust almost comparable to the level of trust in friends, and robust enough to supersede the need to meet in person before engaging in high-stakes exchanges. Two ride-sharers who have never met end up trusting each other more than colleagues who share the same office and meet every day. This finding held true across all countries surveyed, revealing the universality of this phenomenon. See Exhibit 1. We also examined brand effects. InterestEXHIBIT 2 ingly, respondents highly trusted ride-sharMore Trusting Since ers with a full profile on Ride-sharing BlaBlaCar (88 percent) MILLENNIALS & NON-MILLENNIALS more than ride-sharers ALIKE ARE OPEN TO TRY OTHER TYPES OF Non-Millennials Millennials whose profiles included COLLABORATIVE SERVICES. the exact same information but on another gener80% ic platform (67 percent). This difference shows that brands still play an imporx1.3 x1.5 x1.9 x1.3 tant role and remain an esx1.7 sential and powerful proxy 13% x1.5 17% 24% for trust in today’s sharing 11% 19% economy. The broader x2.1 implication is that while x1.9 14% x1.8 x2.0 x2.5 x3.1 platforms are empowering individuals to trust 8% 10% 8% 10% 9% 11% each other, they must also create trust in their own ability to host and moderPeer-to-peer Crowdfunding Co-working Peer-to-peer Sharing Buying and selling ate interactions. car rental house rentals skills of used goods 30 THIRD QUARTER 2016 ISSUE 30 IESEinsight This document is authorized for use only by Ahmad Ahmad in Spring 24 BA 3500 MIS taught by Evelyn Odonkor, American University In Paris from Jan 2024 to May 2024. For the exclusive use of A. Ahmad, 2024. How Digital Trust Powers the Sharing Economy The Trust Mechanisms That Matter Next, we stripped away brand to test the underlying tools that are encapsulated in what BlaBlaCar calls the DREAMS framework (see sidebar on page 27). Our analysis revealed that the factors related to the six dimensions of the framework were correlated with higher levels of trust and, as the experience level of a member on the platform grew, were more correlated with bilateral trust. This indicates that members may start out by garnering their trust from a brand but, as they become more familiar with the tools over time, they shift the basis for their decisions to the trust capital of the driver/passenger. Looking more specifically at which levers create trust, ratings remain a critical criterion aﬀecting both drivers’ and passengers’ choice to travel with a peer, though notably more so for passengers. The other criteria for choosing whom to travel with include proﬁle photos, speaking together on the phone prior to the exchange and experience levels, as well as comfort criteria such as whether an individual is a smoker and how many people will be in the car. Comfort and civility go a long way toward creating a trusted environment. It is worth pointing out that the weight of these mechanisms depends on the stakes involved in the exchange. Craigslist, for example, favors a low-stakes, low-trust strategy, while eBay and Etsy use ratings but do limited moderation themselves. Platforms such as BlaBlaCar and Airbnb, on the other hand, oﬀer high-stakes oﬄine experiences, so they have to put more thought and eﬀort into creating the highest possible level of trust between their users through ratings, moderation, verified IDs and insurance. This means they will have to pay much more attention to the six pillars of the DREAMS framework. active on accommodation rental and skillssharing platforms, and 39 percent were active on used-goods marketplaces. Activity on peer-topeer car rental, crowdfunding and co-working platforms, however, was relatively limited. When asked whether their participation in ride-sharing had made them want to try other types of collaborative services, we found that people were between one and three times more likely to try other forms of sharing economy activities. These potential spillovers were higher for Millennials. While this diﬀerence was not surprising, given this digitally connected generation’s openness to new digital platforms, the gap between Millennials and non-Millennials was not as wide as expected, diﬀering only by single-digit percentage points. See Exhibit 2. The consistency of the results across age groups and countries would suggest that the collaborative trend is a social shift that is expanding across a broad cross-section of society. It is worth reflecting on how far we have come in less than a decade. Centuries-old social constructs have been superseded, organizations are being disintermediated by connected peers, ownership is being replaced by shared usage, and even our ancestral apprehension of strangers is changing. As we reinforce our faith in each other through greater social and economic interactions with online peers, the overall level of trust in society grows. When human beings trust each other more, a virtuous cycle of collaboration is set in motion. The possibilities become endless. We are at the dawn of an incredibly promising era. Together, we are entering the Trust Age. Positive Spillovers Across the Sharing Economy Close to half of BlaBlaCar members declared that ride-sharing had made them more open to others. We tested whether this openness could result in ride-sharers wanting to try other forms of sharing economy consumption and whether familiarity with one collaborative service could have positive spillovers on the usage of other collaborative services. A quarter of BlaBlaCar members declared that, prior to ride-sharing, they were already IESEinsight TO KNOW MORE Q Q Mazzella, F. and A. Sundararajan. Entering the Trust Age. BlaBlaCar and NYU Stern, 2016. Available at http://blablacar.com/trust/ Sundararajan, A. The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism MIT Press, 2016. ISSUE 30 THIRD QUARTER 2016 31 This document is authorized for use only by Ahmad Ahmad in Spring 24 BA 3500 MIS taught by Evelyn Odonkor, American University In Paris from Jan 2024 to May 2024.

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