Cultivating a Network of Trust: Exploring the Trust Building Agency of Objects in Home Sharing

With trust so central to the function and success of home sharing, this research proposes that trust is best established through interplay of trust entities. However, apart from literature detailing trust in platform security (Lu, Wang, and Hayes, 2012), in the seller (Ert, Fleischer, and Magen, 2016), or in reviews (Filieri, 2016), little is understood about how trust is built in home sharing. In order to offer a more refined understanding of trust, we explore the sources of rational, affective and contextual trust and suggest the value in tracing objects as a key property of trust building in home sharing. We review this emergence through the lens of consumer culture perspectives (Arnould and Thompson, 2005) embedded in organizational trust literature (Korsgaard, Brower, and Lester, 2015) to assist in providing a vocabulary that can serve as an organizing framework. To understand how trust is built in home sharing networks (Airbnb), this study adopts interpretivist research practices. This approach enables an in-depth understanding of participants’ Airbnb experiences (shared with hosts or full unit rentals) specifically relating to trust in engaging in the network. This study is based on a three-year multisited ethnography of Airbnb consumption experiences that includes netnographic data (Kozinets, 2010) of Airbnb online communities in New Zealand, interviews with guests and hosts and field observation.