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Judgments in the Sharing Economy: The Effect of User-Generated Trust and Reputation Information on Decision-Making Accuracy and Bias

The growing ecosystem of peer-to-peer enterprise – the Sharing Economy (SE) – has brought with it a substantial change in how we access and provide goods and services. Within the SE, individuals make decisions based mainly on user-generated trust and reputation information (TRI). Recent research ind...

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Autores principales: Zloteanu, Mircea, Harvey, Nigel, Tuckett, David, Livan, Giacomo
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8637778/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34867688
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.776999
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author Zloteanu, Mircea
Harvey, Nigel
Tuckett, David
Livan, Giacomo
author_facet Zloteanu, Mircea
Harvey, Nigel
Tuckett, David
Livan, Giacomo
author_sort Zloteanu, Mircea
collection PubMed
description The growing ecosystem of peer-to-peer enterprise – the Sharing Economy (SE) – has brought with it a substantial change in how we access and provide goods and services. Within the SE, individuals make decisions based mainly on user-generated trust and reputation information (TRI). Recent research indicates that the use of such information tends to produce a positivity bias in the perceived trustworthiness of fellow users. Across two experimental studies performed on an artificial SE accommodation platform, we test whether users’ judgments can be accurate when presented with diagnostic information relating to the quality of the profiles they see or if these overly positive perceptions persist. In study 1, we find that users are quite accurate overall (70%) at determining the quality of a profile, both when presented with full profiles or with profiles where they selected three TRI elements they considered useful for their decision-making. However, users tended to exhibit an “upward quality bias” when making errors. In study 2, we leveraged patterns of frequently vs. infrequently selected TRI elements to understand whether users have insights into which are more diagnostic and find that presenting frequently selected TRI elements improved users’ accuracy. Overall, our studies demonstrate that – positivity bias notwithstanding – users can be remarkably accurate in their online SE judgments.
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spelling pubmed-86377782021-12-03 Judgments in the Sharing Economy: The Effect of User-Generated Trust and Reputation Information on Decision-Making Accuracy and Bias Zloteanu, Mircea Harvey, Nigel Tuckett, David Livan, Giacomo Front Psychol Psychology The growing ecosystem of peer-to-peer enterprise – the Sharing Economy (SE) – has brought with it a substantial change in how we access and provide goods and services. Within the SE, individuals make decisions based mainly on user-generated trust and reputation information (TRI). Recent research indicates that the use of such information tends to produce a positivity bias in the perceived trustworthiness of fellow users. Across two experimental studies performed on an artificial SE accommodation platform, we test whether users’ judgments can be accurate when presented with diagnostic information relating to the quality of the profiles they see or if these overly positive perceptions persist. In study 1, we find that users are quite accurate overall (70%) at determining the quality of a profile, both when presented with full profiles or with profiles where they selected three TRI elements they considered useful for their decision-making. However, users tended to exhibit an “upward quality bias” when making errors. In study 2, we leveraged patterns of frequently vs. infrequently selected TRI elements to understand whether users have insights into which are more diagnostic and find that presenting frequently selected TRI elements improved users’ accuracy. Overall, our studies demonstrate that – positivity bias notwithstanding – users can be remarkably accurate in their online SE judgments. Frontiers Media S.A. 2021-11-16 /pmc/articles/PMC8637778/ /pubmed/34867688 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.776999 Text en Copyright © 2021 Zloteanu, Harvey, Tuckett and Livan. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Zloteanu, Mircea
Harvey, Nigel
Tuckett, David
Livan, Giacomo
Judgments in the Sharing Economy: The Effect of User-Generated Trust and Reputation Information on Decision-Making Accuracy and Bias
title Judgments in the Sharing Economy: The Effect of User-Generated Trust and Reputation Information on Decision-Making Accuracy and Bias
title_full Judgments in the Sharing Economy: The Effect of User-Generated Trust and Reputation Information on Decision-Making Accuracy and Bias
title_fullStr Judgments in the Sharing Economy: The Effect of User-Generated Trust and Reputation Information on Decision-Making Accuracy and Bias
title_full_unstemmed Judgments in the Sharing Economy: The Effect of User-Generated Trust and Reputation Information on Decision-Making Accuracy and Bias
title_short Judgments in the Sharing Economy: The Effect of User-Generated Trust and Reputation Information on Decision-Making Accuracy and Bias
title_sort judgments in the sharing economy: the effect of user-generated trust and reputation information on decision-making accuracy and bias
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8637778/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34867688
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.776999
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