First vs. Lasting Impressions: How Cognitive and Affective Trust Cues Coordinate Match-Making in Online Sharing Platforms

Digital platforms facilitate the coordination, match making, and value creation for large groups of individuals. In consumer-to-consumer (C2C) online sharing platforms specifically, trust between these individuals is a central concept in determining which individuals will eventually engage in a transaction. The majority of today’s online platforms draw on various types of cues for group coordination and trust building among users. Current research widely accepts the capacity of such cues but largely ignores their changing effectiveness over the course of a user’s lifetime on the platform. To address this gap, we conduct a laboratory experiment, studying the interplay of cognitive and affective trust cues over the course a multi-period trust experiment for the coordination of groups. We find that the trust-building capacity of affective trust cues is time-dependent and follows an inverted u-shape form, suggesting a dynamic complementarity of cognitive and affective trust cues.