Fostering trust: When the rhetoric of sharing can backfire

The peer-to-peer lending and transfer of underutilized resources – the so-called Sharing Economy – make up for a sizeable and rapidly increasing portion of the economy. The digital platforms that enable it have the primary goal of promoting trust among users and providers. In an online experiment, we study how the platform’s revenue model (No-profit vs. For-profit) interacts with its communication strategy in shaping trust. In particular, we consider two communication strategies, one highlighting the trust dimension and the other highlighting the interaction’s profitability. We show how these strategies can affect trust differently for pure-sharing and market-oriented for-profit platforms. We observe that a communication strategy that evokes trust feelings, if sent by a for-profit platform, decreases trust in the interaction. This evidence suggests that leveraging a rhetoric of trust can backfire for profit-oriented platforms in terms of trust generation.