Research On Effect Of Socialized Sharing Platform On Consumers' Willingness To Participate In Sharing Platform

In order to solve the information asymmetry and make full use of resources(unused goods,spare capacity and so on),the sharing economy,which based on the application of mobile internet technology and focused on the consumption of the right to use,is developing rapidly.Lack of trust is considered to be one of the important problems hindering the development of sharing economy.Some scholars said that trust is a fundamental determinant of sharing economy development and ensuring shared satisfaction.At present,sharing economy enterprises have established product evaluation system and docked a third party credit rating system(i.e.Zhima Credit)to promote consumers' trust.However,with most enterprises are becoming more and more consistent in evaluation and credit rating system,there is a new problem emerged: how to further deepen consumers' trust in order to promote consumers' intention to participate continuously.Some previous work already pointed that trust is the product of social relationships and social networks play an important role in building trust in sharing economy.And people are always more willing to accept the opinions of people who have social relations with them.Hence,with the feature of participant of everyone in sharing economy,it is necessary to further strengthen consumers' trust through the social interaction among consumers and between consumers and sharing platforms.Based on the social influence theory,trust theory and the theory of perceived uncertainty,we explore the impact of socialized sharing platform on consumer platform trust,and whether it further affects consumer participation willingness.At the same time,the perceived utility uncertainty is introduced to explore whether it has interaction with the socialized sharing platform.Then,by combing the previous literature and characteristics of sharing economy,we put forward the basic characteristics of this socialized sharing platform.We collect data by questionnaire experiment.The results show that the socializing of shared platform has a significant positive effect on the consumer trust of platform.And consumer platform trust is a mediator in the relationship between sharing platform socializing and consumer platform participation willingness,that is,sharing platform socializing influences its platform participation intention by enhancing consumer platform trust.Moreover,the higher the perceived utility uncertainty,the more significant the positive impact of the socialized sharing platform on its platform trust.In addition,we prove that social interaction,free transaction and timely validity of information have significant positive effects on trust of consumer platform in socialized sharing platform.The contributions of this paper are as follows: firstly,we expand the scope of socialization application to the sharing economy.Secondly,we regard perceived utility uncertainty as a moderator variable to regulate the influence of socializing on consumer trust,which complements the application of the theory of perceived uncertainty.On the other hand,this paper also provides a feasible differentiated competition strategy for sharing platform enterprises,which proves consumers' need for sharing platform socializing.