Building users’ intention to participate in a sharing economy with institutional and calculative mechanisms: an empirical investigation of DiDi in China

Although trust is a key factor in overcoming uncertainty and mitigating risk in a sharing economy, we do not have a thorough understanding of how users' trust in service providers develops in this context. This study focuses on drivers enrolled in China’s DiDi platform as the research object and investigates the effects of institutional and calculative mechanisms on their trust and intention to participate in the sharing economy. The empirical results reveal that feedback mechanism, driver protection, and dispute resolution positively affect institution-based trust, and perceived risks and benefits are significantly related to calculative-based trust. Furthermore, institution based trust and calculative-based trust, in turn, promote the driver’s intention to participate in the sharing economy. The study also finds that both institution-based trust and calculative-based trust play mediating roles, and calculative-based trust is more important for drivers.