A relational-models view to explain peer-to-peer sharing

The growth of peer-to-peer sharing is crucially dependent on continued participation of current platform members and on them behaving prosocially towards other participants who are usually strangers. We propose a relational-models view that revolves around the idea that how members perceive the relationships among participants on a sharing platform significantly affects these behavioural outcomes. We test this idea with a survey where we capture participants’ perceptions of sharing relationships using Fiske’s (1991) relational models ‒ communal sharing, market pricing, and equality matching. We show that communal sharing and equality matching foster prosocial behaviour (which we label sharing citizenship behaviour) and the willingness to continue participating, whereas market pricing does not have the negative effects we expected. Our work advances relational models theory in addition to contributing to the literature on the sharing economy.