Trust in the Sharing Economy. Can trust make or break a sharing enterprise?

All over the world, people are renting rooms from strangers through Airbnb, outsourcing grocery trips to TaskRabbits, and getting across town with ride-sharing service BlaBlaCar. These people are participating in the sharing economy that has rapidly grown from a niche market to a mainstream social movement. Its continued growth and, thus, the future success of sharing economy companies is contingent upon one crucial factor: trust. Accordingly , this term paper approaches the question: Can trust make or break a sharing enterprise? The paper will address this topic by introducing the new economic force called sharing economy at first. The next two chapters will present the construct of trust on the basis of literature that deals with trust in a business context as well as trust in the sharing economy. Furthermore, a trust-building framework for online sharing services will be presented based on a recent study that was conducted, exclusively on the building process of Peer to Peer (P2P) trust. In the discussion section in Chapter 5 different approaches to the importance of trust for P2P marketplaces will be discussed. Subsequently, conclusions will be drawn based on the contents of the previous sections while there will be also made recommendations for the future.