Participation In Collaborative Consumption:A Value Co-creation Perspective

In recent years,with developments in information and communications technology(ICT),growing consumer awareness,proliferation of collaborative online communities as well as sharing,there is an emerging trend called "Sharing Economy"that is increasingly and intensively transforming consumer behavior.Actually,more and more new forms of collaborative consumption through sharing economy find applications in the private,public and nonprofit sector alike.Collaborative consumption,defined as a specific consumer behavior of "people coordinating the acquisition and distribution of a resource for a fee or other compensation through online community",includes car sharing such as Uber or Zipcar,accommodation sharing via Airbnb and more.However,there is neither much knowledge about the fact why consumers are willing to engage in collaborative consumption.Value is a central concept in consumer behavior and it directly explains why consumers choose to buy or avoid particular products or services,while value co-creation theory focuses more on the value within consumption experiences and its impact.Therefore,our first study proposed a research model to explore possible factors affecting consumers’ attitudes towards collaborative consumption from a value co-creation perspective.According to prior literature on collaborative consumption and literature on consumer value and value co-creation,five factors as key determinants of attitude towards collaborative consumption,including economic value,social value,entertainment value,convenience value,and familiarity were identified.A large scale survey of 289 students was then implemented and data analysis results suggested that economic value,social value,entertainment value and familiarity significantly affect people’s attitude towards collaborative consumption.Due to the effect of social value on consumers’ attitudes of this study opposite to the prior studies,there followed a supplementary study which was focused on the multiple dimensions of social value.Based on social capital theory,motivation theory and social psychology theory,factors may exert social influence on consumers’attitudes toward collaborative consumption were chosen to build the second research model,which include reputation,altruism,social connection,social trust,reciprocity and social embarrassment.A specific collaborative consumption experiment and a survey after experiment was conducted among the same 289 students.The data results showed that reputation,altruism,reciprocity was positively associated with the attitude towards collaborative consumption while social embarrassment was negatively associated with it.Finally,the practical and theoretical contributions of our study were presented as follows.Firstly,a systematic research model on participation in collaborative consumption from novel value co-creation perspective was provided.Secondly,a new field experiment for the first time was designed to conduct this study.Thirdly,multiple dimension of social value with different effects on consumer attitude were found.Finally,the moderating effects of personal innovativeness and gender were verified in this study.