Reputation offsets trust judgments based on social biases among Airbnb users

Fighting bias with bias: How same-race endorsements reduce racial discrimination on Airbnb

Recent studies have documented racial discrimination in online interactions, mirroring the historic bias observed offline. The sharing economy is especially vulnerable due to greater dependence on mutual trust in sharing a ride, residence, or date with a stranger. These services rely on user recommendations to build trust, but the effects of these peer evaluations on racial bias are only beginning to be explored. Using data from Airbnb, we examine in-group preference for same-race hosts as well as same-race recommendations. The unexpected result is that these two manifestations of racial bias are offsetting, not reinforcing. White guests largely overcame their racial bias in host selection when hosts were endorsed by previous white guests. Moreover, we found no evidence of racial bias in the affective enthusiasm of endorsements, which suggests that the preference for same-race endorsements is motivated by the race of the recommender, not the content of the recommendation.

Sharing on platforms: Reducing perceived risk for peer-to-peer platform consumers through trust-building and regulation

Sharing a flat with strangers is no longer hypothetical but well accepted by many consumers who participate in peer-to-peer (P2P) services. Online P2P sharing platforms act as intermediaries between providers and consumers who do not know each other personally. Sharing via platforms entails a certain amount of risk for consumers. Thus, in order to attract consumers, platforms need to apply mechanisms to reduce the perceived risk of potential consumers. In a prestudy and two experimental online surveys, the current research investigates whether trust-building measures and regulation mechanisms presented on a website can reduce the potential consumers' level of perceived risk and increase their willingness to participate in a platform's sharing offer. First, an analysis of existing P2P accommodation platforms showed a lack of regulation mechanisms. Second, the manipulation of information on P2P accommodation platforms' websites in two online experiments revealed that regulation mechanisms led to lower perceived risk and a higher intention to engage in sharing. However, commonly used trust-building measures on P2P accommodation platforms show no significant effect on risk perception and the intention to engage in sharing in the present study. We point out relevant managerial possibilities to minimise the perceived risk of potential consumers of P2P platforms.

Patient's behavior of selection physician in online health communities: Based on an Elaboration likelihood model

Background

With the rapid development of "Internet + medicine" and the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic, online health communities have become an important way for patients to seek medical treatment. However, the mistrust between physicians and patients in online health communities has long existed and continues to impact the decision-making behavior of patients. The purpose of this article is to explore the influencing factors of patient decision-making in online health communities by identifying the relationship between physicians' online information and patients' selection behavior.

Methods

In this study, we selected China's Good Doctor (www.haodf.com) as the source of data, scrapped 10,446 physician data from December 2020 to June 2021 to construct a logit model of online patients' selection behavior, and used regression analysis to test the hypotheses.

Results

The number of types of services, number of scientific articles, and avatar in physicians' personal information all has a positive effect on patients' selection behavior, while the title and personal introduction hurt patients' selection behavior. Online word-of-mouth positively affected patients' selection behavior and disease risk had a moderating effect.

Conclusion

Focusing on physician-presented information, this article organically combines the Elaboration likelihood model with trust source theory and online word-of-mouth from the perspective of the trusted party-physician, providing new ideas for the study of factors influencing patients' selection behavior in online health communities. The findings provide useful insights for patients, physicians, and community managers about the relationship between physician information and patients' selection behavior.

Can Customers Affect Racial Discrimination in Hiring?

While significant scholarship has documented the prevalence of racial discrimination in hiring, less is known about the forces that exacerbate or mitigate it. In this article, we develop a theoretical argument about the ability of customers to influence racial discrimination in hiring, highlighting the role of direct customer communication and its intersection with online review systems. We deploy a novel method to test our argument. Specifically, we draw on original data from a two-part field experiment that first randomly assigned restaurants to receive one of three different email messages from customers and then audited the restaurants to test for racial discrimination in hiring. While our data collection effort was cut short and disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic, making our findings more exploratory than initially anticipated, our data provide evidence that customer communication can reduce racial discrimination under certain conditions. We discuss the implications of these findings for scholarship on organizational decision-making, discrimination, and methodological approaches for studying these topics.

The social infrastructure of online marketplaces: Trade, work and the interplay of decided and emergent orders

This study is designed to remedy the tendency of existing studies to analyze online marketplaces as either sites of work or trading arenas. We argue that the theoretical notion of "social infrastructure" is particularly apt to offer a comprehensive framework that captures the unique intersection of work and trade in online marketplaces. We study the social infrastructure of an online marketplace: the institutions, conditions and forms, and the horizontal and vertical ties between actors that organize work and enable trading. The social infrastructure of online marketplaces deserves research attention because it represents an essential condition for economic activities. In our empirical section we focus on the online marketplace Etsy to illustrate our comprehensive theoretical framework and we identify a complex dynamic between the decided and emergent order of the online marketplace. We demonstrate that the attempt to superimpose order through the constitution of an online marketplace is challenged by sellers and buyers. We find that both dimensions, work and trade, provide actors with material and symbolic resources that inform their strategies and economic actions. The article suggests that "social infrastructure" is a concrete theoretical tool for analyzing online marketplaces that complements existing research on platforms and ecosystems.

In Cloud We Trust? Co-opting Occupational Gatekeepers to Produce Normalized Trust in Platform-Mediated Interorganizational Relationships

Interorganizational trust plays an important role in facilitating business relationships, especially for the organizational adoption of new services. Prior research suggests that interorganizational trust develops when the trustor has adequate confidence in the reliability of the trustee’s services. Nevertheless, reliability breakdowns are also an inevitable part of service provisioning. Such breakdowns are especially prominent and visible in the context of platform-based services. Yet platform-based services continue to be adopted and used by organizational customers. This increased adoption and use of such services despite their inconsistent reliability pose the following question. How is trust produced in platform-mediated interorganizational relationships? To examine this question, I conducted a 20-month field study of a cloud computing platform provider and its customers, focusing on the practices of trust production in the wake of reliability breakdowns. Here, I describe customer concerns about the platform’s inconsistent reliability that hampered the development of interorganizational trust. I then identify four practices of trust work enacted by the platform provider to address some of these concerns and to co-opt the occupational gatekeepers in customer organizations who are responsible for technology adoption decisions. Following this, I describe how and why these occupational gatekeepers performed justification work to rationalize the continued use of the platform despite its inconsistent reliability. Together, trust work and justification work facilitate the coproduction of interorganizational trust through normalizing reliability breakdowns as “business-as-usual” events. Synthesizing these findings, I developed a normalization model of trust production, and discuss the implications of normalized trust for platform-mediated interorganizational relationships in the digital economy.

Effective and Ineffective Service Recovery Recipes in the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Sharing-Service Model: Using the Fuzzy-Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) Approach

In a peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing-service model, a platform provider (PP) has no direct control over the service quality of peer service providers (PSPs). However, an unpleasant experience with a single PSP may impact customer responses to the PP. Hence, the PP should offer PSPs guidelines on how to cope with service failures. To identify effective/ineffective recovery strategies, this study examined the influence of the characteristics of service failure/recovery and customers that influence customers’ behavioral intentions toward the PP. Specifically, it employed multiple regression analysis (MRA) and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to analyze the complex relationships between service failure/recovery characteristics (severity of service failure and source of service recovery) and customers’ characteristics (PSP experience, age, and gender) regarding customers’ behavioral intentions (reuse and switching intentions of the PP). The results show (1) four solutions leading to high reuse intention and two solutions leading to high switching intention of the PP when the severity of service failure is high and (2) three solutions leading to high reuse intention and two solutions leading to high switching intention of the PP when the severity of service failure is low. By investigating recovery configurations reflecting the unique characteristics of P2P sharing services, this study contributes to the literature on both P2P sharing services and service failure/recovery.

Gossip and reputation in everyday life

Gossip-a sender communicating to a receiver about an absent third party-is hypothesized to impact reputation formation, partner selection, and cooperation. Laboratory experiments have found that people gossip about others' cooperativeness and that they use gossip to condition their cooperation. Here, we move beyond the laboratory and test several predictions from theories of indirect reciprocity and reputation-based partner selection about the content of everyday gossip and how people use it to update the reputation of others in their social network. In a Dutch community sample (N = 309), we sampled daily events in which people either sent or received gossip about a target over 10 days (ngossip = 5284). Gossip senders frequently shared information about targets' cooperativeness and did so in ways that minimize potential retaliation from targets. Receivers overwhelmingly believed gossip to be true and updated their evaluation of targets based on gossip. In turn, a positive shift in the evaluation of a target was associated with higher intentions to help them in future interactions, and with lower intentions to avoid them in the future. Thus, gossip is used in daily life to impact and update reputations in a way that enables partner selection and indirect reciprocity. This article is part of the theme issue 'The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling'.

Direct punishment and indirect reputation-based tactics to intervene against offences

Punishment and reputation-based mechanisms play a major role in supporting the evolution of human cooperation. Theoretical accounts and field observations suggest that humans use multiple tactics to intervene against offences-including confrontation, gossip and ostracism-which have unique benefits and costs. Here, we draw a distinction between direct punishment tactics (i.e. physical and verbal confrontation) and indirect reputation-based tactics (i.e. gossip and ostracism). Based on this distinction, we sketch the common and unique social functions that different tactics are tailored to serve and describe information-processing mechanisms that potentially underlie decisions concerning how to intervene against offences. We propose that decision rules guiding direct and indirect tactics should weigh information about the benefits of changing others' behaviour versus the costs of potential retaliation. Based on a synthesis of existing evidence, we highlight the role of situational, relational and emotional factors in motivating distinct punishment tactics. We suggest that delineating between direct and indirect tactics can inform debates about the prevalence and functions of punishment and the reputational consequences of third-party intervention against offences. We emphasize the need to study how people use reputation-based tactics for partner recalibration and partner choice, within interdependent relationships and social networks, and in daily life situations. This article is part of the theme issue 'The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling'.

Psychological science for a responsible sharing economy

The sharing economy is fueled by trust, which allows strangers to cooperate. To share responsibly, one needs to be aware of the various consequences sharing has on interacting and third parties. When transparency about such consequences is lacking, mutual trust among interacting parties may encourage people to cooperate and share, in turn, creating unintended negative impacts. Psychologists have long studied trust and cooperation, yet few insights from psychological science have been used to understand the sharing economy. Here, we propose that evoking trust may paradoxically increase motivated information processing leading people to share irresponsibly by ignoring the negative consequences sharing has on others. We review three conditions under which evoking trust may lead to irresponsible sharing: ethical blind spots, willful ignorance, and misinformation. We propose that transparent information is key to enable and encourage responsible sharing. More psychological research is needed to better understand how this flourishing, trust-based industry can be shaped to encourage safe, cooperative, and responsible sharing.

How Managers Maintain Control Through Collaborative Repair: Evidence from Platform-Mediated “Gigs”

This paper develops a new understanding about how “client managers”—those using platform labor markets to hire and manage workers—attempt to maintain control when managing skilled contractors. We conducted an inductive field study analyzing interactions between client managers and contractors in software development “gigs” mediated by a platform labor market. The platform provided multiple tools client managers could use for control, including in response to unexpected events. We found that, when managers used the tools to exert coercive control over contractors acting unexpectedly, it backfired and contributed to uncompleted project outcomes. In contrast, when they refrained from using the tools for coercive control in such circumstances and instead engaged in what we call collaborative repair, their actions contributed to completed project outcomes. Collaborative repair refers to interactions that surface misaligned interpretations of a situation and help parties negotiate new, reciprocal expectations that restore trust and willingness to continue an exchange. Client managers’ attempts at collaborative repair yielded fuller understanding of project-related breakdowns and shared investment in new expectations, facilitating effective control and completed projects. This study extends prior theories of control by characterizing the new client manager role created by platforms and demonstrating how initiating repair is integral for managers’ capacity to accomplish control in these comparatively brittle work relationships.

Ethical challenges in argumentation and dialogue in a healthcare context

As the average age of the population increases, so too do the number of people living with chronic illnesses. With limited resources available, the development of dialogue-based e-health systems that provide justified general health advice offers a cost-effective solution to the management of chronic conditions. It is however imperative that such systems are responsible in their approach. We present in this paper two main challenges for the deployment of e-health systems, that have a particular relevance to dialogue and argumentation: collecting and handling health data, and trust. For both challenges, we look at specific issues therein, outlining their importance in general, and describing their relevance to dialogue and argumentation. Finally, we go on to propose six recommendations for handling these issues, towards addressing the main challenges themselves, that act both as general advice for dialogue and argumentation research in the e-health domain, and as a foundation for future work on this topic.

Peer-to-Peer Tourism: Tourists’ Profile Estimation through Artificial Neural Networks

Peer-to-peer tourism is one of the great global trends that is transforming the tourism sector, introducing several changes in many aspects of tourism, such as the way of travelling, staying or living the experience in the destination. This research aims to determine the relationship between the sociodemographic characteristics of tourists interested in peer-to-peer accommodation and the importance they give to various motivational factors about this type of tourism in a “cultural-tourism” city. The methodology used in this research is an artificial neural network of the multilayer perceptron type to estimate a sociodemographic profile of the peer-to-peer accommodation tourist user based on predetermined input values consisting of the answers to the Likert-type questions previously carried out using a questionnaire. Thus, the model developed, through a customized set of answers to these questions, allows the presentation of a “composite picture” of a peer-to-peer tourist based on sociodemographic characteristics. This function is especially interesting for adapting the peer-to-peer hosting offer according to the preferences of potential users.

Factors that determine a Patient's willingness to physician selection in online healthcare communities: A trust theory perspective

Health care users and patients are increasingly using online health communities to seek medical service, especially during the COVID-19 epidemic. The factors that determine the online trust between physicians and patients perplex the stakeholders for a long time. Based on the trust theory, this study explored the influence of physicians' personal quality and online reputation on patients' selection. A longitudinal panel data collection exercise, covering 11905 physicians on haodf. com, was conducted on May 20, 2018, May 22, 2019 and May 25, 2020. The random effect models are used to test our hypothesis. Results show that physicians' quality (competence, benevolence, and integrity) and online reputation (online reviews and online rating) can significantly affect patients' selection. Moreover, the physician's gender can enhance the influence of online reputation on patients' selection. As online healthcare community becomes an increasingly appealing channel for health, the frequency of the physician's quality information updating and the quality of online service are equally important to online physician-patient trust.

Take me on a ride: The role of environmentalist identity for carpooling

Sharing does not need to involve corporate providers but can also happen on a peer-to-peer (P2P) basis. P2P sharing platforms who match private providers and users are thus dealing with two different customer segments. An example of this is carpooling, the sharing of a car journey. Recent years have seen considerable research on why people use sharing services. In contrast, there is little knowledge of why people may offer a good for sharing purposes. Drawing on identity theory, this paper suggests that users and providers of carpooling need to be addressed differently. A pilot study and two studies, including both actual car owners and nonowners confirm that the extent to which one identifies as an environmentalist predicts car owners' willingness to offer carpooling, but does not affect nonowners' willingness to use carpooling services. These findings remain robust when controlling for various potential confounds. Furthermore, Study 2 suggests that an environmentalist identity plays an important role for car owners' actual decision to offer a ride via an online platform. These results suggest that marketers of P2P platforms need to pursue different strategies when addressing potential users and providers on the same platform.

Gossip in the Dictator and Ultimatum Games: Its Immediate and Downstream Consequences for Cooperation

In this research, we examine how cooperation emerges and develops in sequential dyadic interactions when the initial interaction varies in strategic considerations (i.e., fear of partner rejection) or potential gossip by one's partner that may affect subsequent interactions. In a lab experiment involving real-time interactions (N = 240) across 39 sessions, participants acted in different roles (i.e., Person A, B, and C) in two different games-Person A was first assigned to allocate an amount of resource to Person B in a dictator game or an ultimatum game. Afterward, Person C interacted with Person A (i.e., trustee) as a trustor in a trust game. Prior to their decisions, participants (a) learned that Person B could gossip by sending evaluations about Person A's behavior to Person C prior to the trust game or (b) did not receive this information. Findings replicate previous research showing that potential gossip by one's partner greatly increases cooperation that is revealed in the resources allocated to the partner. Yet, compared to the dictator game, the presence of strategic considerations in the ultimatum game does not significantly enhance cooperation, and even makes people less likely to reciprocate others' behavior in the subsequent interaction. Interestingly, when there is no gossip, those who have played the ultimatum game, compared to the dictator game, are more trusted by others but do not vary in reciprocity in the subsequent interaction. However, when there is gossip, those who have played the dictator game, compared to the ultimatum game, are more trusted and also more likely to reciprocate others' behavior in the subsequent interaction. These findings imply that gossip invariably promotes cooperation across strategic and non-strategic situations, but the potential rejection by one's partner weakly promotes cooperation, and even undermines future cooperation especially when paired with reputation sharing opportunities. We discuss the implications of these findings for implementing reputation systems that can promote and maintain cooperation cost-effectively.

Resource sharing in technologically defined social networks

Technologically enabled sharing-economy networks are changing the way humans trade and collaborate. Here, using a novel 'Wi-Fi sharing' game, we explored determinants of human sharing strategy. Subjects (N = 1,950) participated in a networked game in which they could choose how to allocate a limited, but personally not usable, resource (representing unused Wi-Fi bandwidth) to immediate network neighbors. We first embedded N = 600 subjects into 30 networks, experimentally manipulating the range over which subjects could connect. We find that denser networks decrease any wealth inequality, but that this effect saturates. Individuals' benefit is shaped by their network position, with having many partners who in turn have few partners being especially beneficial. We propose a new, simplified "sharing centrality" metric for quantifying this. Further experiments (N = 1,200) confirm the robustness of the effect of network structure on sharing behavior. Our findings suggest the possibility of interventions to help more evenly distribute shared resources over networks.

Consumption in the Circular Economy: A Literature Review

A circular economy (CE) aims at decoupling value creation from waste generation and resource use by radically transforming production and consumption systems. Recent reviews on the topic of the circular economy have indicated that cultural barriers are a significant factor hindering the diffusion of so-called ‘circular’ business models, particularly the lack of consumer—or user—acceptance. However, none of them has provided an overview of the existing literature addressing such issues that can help academics and practitioners better understand consumption considerations when addressing the circular economy. Motivated by these observations, this paper presents the results of a literature review that summarises and discusses insights from 111 articles in terms of the problem area, theoretical approaches, methods, and tools that have been used to collect and analyse data, the main issues, and identified research gaps. The results show that most of the existing scientific work on the circular economy and circular solutions addressing consumption has focussed on identifying factors that drive or hinder the consumption of circular solutions. A smaller but expanding set of articles has focussed on offering insights into the nature, meaning, and dynamics of consumption in the context of the circular economy. According to this set of articles, consumption in the circular economy is anonymous, connected, political, uncertain, and based on multiple values, not only utility. A smaller set of papers has explored the integration of user and consumer perspectives into design processes. Although these contributions are relevant, opportunities for further research are still open, particularly regarding socio-material and cultural aspects of consumption in the context of the circular economy, and the role of digitalisation. In addition, more work could be done regarding strategies to foster not only acceptance but also the adoption and diffusion of the circular economy. Based on the findings of this literature review, some ideas for a research agenda on the issue of consumption in the circular economy are outlined.