Privacy in the Sharing Economy

Contemporary C2C platforms, such as Airbnb, have exhibited considerable growth in recent years and are projected to continue doing so in the future. These novel consumer-to-consumer marketplaces have started to obliterate the boundaries between private and economic spheres. Marketing personal resources online is inherently associated with the disclosure of personal and sometimes intimate information. This raises unprecedented questions of privacy. Yet, there is so far little research on the role of privacy considerations in the sharing economy literature. Leveraging the theoretical perspective of privacy calculus, we address this gap by investigating how privacy concerns and economic prospects shape a potential provider’s intentions to share via different communication channels. We relate privacy concerns back to the provider’s perceptions of the audience. We evaluate our research model by means of a scenario-based online survey, providing broad support for our reasoning

Strategic Positioning of Business Blogging for Enterprises

Some experts concerned that blogging may be in conflict with other more controlled public relation activities and suspect that only those companies in bad financial shape would resort to business blogging as a cheap try. Through analysis of business blogging activities of Fortune 500 companies, we demonstrated that business blogging can be used as a new strategic tool for companies to sustain their existing competitive advantages. We found business blogging tend to correlated with higher sales, lower cost of goods and reduced advertising expenses for companies. We also found that those companies use product differentiation as their main competitive strategy could better utilize business blogging to sustain their competitive position thus maintain or increase their financial performances

FEE -BASED ONLINE SERVICES : EXPLORING CONSUMERS’ WILLINGNESS TO PAY

Many online service businesses are beginning to charge fees for services that they used to provide for free. It is unclear whether consumers are ready to embrace this practice. This study explores consumer attitudes toward fee-based online services. The results of the study indicate that consumers’ willingness to pay for online services is likely to be influenced by their perceived value of convenience these services provide, and by the extent to which they utilize these services. While consumers appear more willing to pay for services that are qualitatively better than free services, there is also indication that the belief remains strong among many that online services that were free in the past should remain free