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Top1. Introduction
A “sharing economy” may be conceived as a new economic form that uses network information technology for optimising the allocation of dispersed resources, improving the efficiency via the Internet, and using online platforms (Sutherland & Jarrahi, 2018). The sharing economy, as the rapid development on a global scale, has profoundly changed the form of production, lifestyles, consumption ideas and employment patterns of people, including both workers and consumers.
Today, the sharing economy has emerged due to the combination of technical and socio-economic factors (Guangju, 2016). Information and communications technology (ICT) promotes the development of the sharing economy. Evidently, the factors of ICT deeply influence the user’s intention to adopt the sharing economy. Recent developments in ICT can change the way strategic organisational decisions are negotiated and voted upon (Vragov & Kumer, 2013). Among such methods is the application of new technologies and ICT, including microfinance and peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, as well as other innovations in society that aid in improving economic growth and development (Kauffman & Riggins, 2012). The influence of the system and interaction quality, security factors and ease of use of ICT on the user’s intention to adopt needs to be explored.
The nature of the sharing economy is that underutilized assets or resources, whether monetized or not, could be mutually shared to improve efficiency, sustainability and communal participation; put simply, it can be encapsulated as overcapacity, sharing platform and everyone’s participation, but only the number of users of required scale can re-play the value and efficiency of dispersed overcapacity (Luisa et al., 2018) . User participation is needed to realize the sharing economy and trust is the basis for the development of the sharing economy. Significant differences are observed in the motivation for the participation of different groups. For example, users and providers have different social backgrounds in the sharing economy, especially in how they are motivated to use the sharing products of different types (Böcker & Meelen, 2017).
Despite the surge in research focus on the sharing economy, very little is known about the user motives for the participation (Tussyadiah & Iis, 2016). Insights on user motivation are instrumental in developing an understanding of the underexplored decision-making processes of users and fostering the general discussion around the sharing economy (Martin, 2016; Piscicelli et al., 2015). A few early scholars on sharing economy have studied drivers for participation (Vaish et al., 2018), for example, claim that economic motivations are dominant in the car sharing platform, Zipcar. Others (Hartl et al., 2016) argue that environmental motivations underlie sharing economy participation, whereas social motivations drive sharing economy participation. Users engage in accommodation sharing as they want to interact with their local hosts (Tussyadiah & Iis, 2016). To date, studies have assumed the existence of the sharing economy but have not distinguished its different forms. The motivations of individuals to share, for instance, a power drill, are different from people sharing an apartment. Researchers (Hellwig et al., 2015) argue that motivations for sharing economy participation can vary according to various sociodemographic groups. People can have other motivations than the providers of goods in the sharing economy given that the activities of providing and using are substantially different (Hamari et al., 2016).