Influence Of Values And Trust On Intentions To Participate In Collaborative Consumption Platforms

Collaborative Consumption(CC)is a social revolution based on the Internet economy.It is a significant kind of innovation and liberation for both human beings and natural resources,and it makes great contributions to environmentally sustainable development.The traditional consumption model of the industrial economy is unsustainable.The industrial economic model has been consuming the assets and resources at an unprecedented rate.The global financial crisis in 2007 and the subsequent real estate bubble have caused many people losing their jobs and even going bankrupt.This was when people began to reflect on hyper-consumption and excessive production,and began to reconnect the interpersonal relationship on the P2 P market,sharing their underutilized resources to other consumers in need and obtaining economic or emotional benefits.Therefore,the inactive resources are transformed into new employment opportunities,creating new streams of revenue,increasing the utilization of commodities,reducing waste of resources,and building a new community on the Internet.CC as a new sustainable consumption model in the Internet era,has been attracting much more attention.Thus,how to effectively guide the public to initiate CC has become the current focus of both governments and academia.This paper summarized the previous research findings on CC and found that people with different value priorities tend to have significant differences in the acceptance and participation.Besides,the CC platform is an artificial market created by connecting reliable strangers,so Trust is one of the most important factors in CC.The consumer on the CC platform are no longer the simple role in the previous e-commerce environment,because they may be the suppliers of resources,so they are the “producers” in the new era of consumption.Thus,it is especially necessary to study the suppliers’ intentions to participate in CC.Based on the above,this paper is supported by the theory of “Cognition-Affection-Conation” and chooses the Values in the context of Chinese culture: Pragmatism,Authoritarism-conformism,Face,and Independence as the independent variables;meanwhile,the mediator,Trust,differentiates between three substantial targets,that is,Trust towards Peer,Platform,and Product(3P).Hence,the structural equation model constructs based on a relationship between Values,Trust and the Intentions to participate in CC.The key objective is to describe how Values and Trust influence users’ Intentions to transact on CC platforms.To this end,we differentiate between the perspectives of consumers and suppliers,and use the idle resources CC platform as an example to conduct a questionnaire survey and collect data for empirical analysis.The study finds that Values have no significant direct impact on users’ Intentions to participate in CC,but 3P play a mediating role between their Values and Intentions.Pragmatism,Authoritarismconformism and Face positively influence users’ Intentions through the mediator of Trust;while,the Value of Independence significantly hinder the users’ Intentions to participate.The Values of consumer’s Pragmatism and suppliers’ Face have a stronger influence on the Intentions through Trust than other three value priorities.Therefore,CC platform operators can promote individual participating intentions by promoting their economic benefits to potential consumers and social benefits to potential suppliers and enhancing trust in the platform.