To Share or Not to Share: Towards Understanding the Antecedents of Participation in IT-Enabled Sharing Services

The search for strategies to mitigate undesirable economic, ecological, and social effects of harmful resource consumption has become an important, socially relevant topic. An obvious starting point for businesses that wish to make value creation more sustainable is to increase the utilization rates of existing resources. Modern social Internet technology is an effective means by which to achieve IT-enabled sharing services, which make idle resource capacity owned by one entity accessible to others who need them but do not want to own them. Successful sharing services require synchronized participation of providers and users of resources. The antecedents of the participation behavior of providers and users has not been systematically addressed by the extant literature. This article therefore proposes a model that explains and predicts the participation behavior in sharing services. Our search for a theoretical foundation revealed the Theory of Planned Behavior as most appropriate lens, because this theory enables us to integrate provider behavior and user behavior as constituents of participation behavior. The model is novel for that it is the first attempt to study the interdependencies between the behavior types in sharing service participation and for that it includes both general and specific determinants of the participation behavior.