Trust in the time of cholera…err… the sharing economy

Who do you trust? I’ve asked this question to thousands of people on five continents over the past few years. As it turns out, everyone tends to answer this question in the same way.

I trust myself, I trust my family, and I trust my friends…well…some of them. This answer spans cultures, countries, genders, ethnicities, and social classes. Said differently, trust derives from relationships.

You want to know how nobody has ever answered this question? “I trust people with five star ratings on uber” or “I trust people with more than 20 good reviews on ebay.” This is unsurprising given the relationship-driven nature of trust. What is surprising is that as a collective, we’ve accepted these non-measures of trust as the ubiquitous mechanism for discerning the quality and suitability of a sharing economy service provider for our needs. Whether choosing a babysitter, doctor, AirBnb, mechanic, coder, or any other service that exposes our family, health, home, assets, or business, we take on enormous risk on the back of anonymous star ratings and random reviews from people we don’t know and whose value and preferences may have little or nothing to do with our own.

We even do this in the face of widespread knowledge of the abuse and manipulation of ratings and reviews on online platforms. You might remember the case of fake restaurant that climbed to the top of TripAdvisor in London? Or perhaps you’ve read about the insidious ecosystem for paid, fake reviews on Amazon?

So why is it that every sharing platform still relies on these mechanisms? Because modeling actual human trust is actually quite difficult. There are layers upon layers of context that actually drive our purchasing decisions that most sharing platforms simply can’t intuit from the data they get, so they go with what everyone else has used, accepting the shortcomings of these approaches as a fact of life and surmising that it’s good enough. Lo you say, there are plenty of companies trying to bring better trust to digital economy. I’m glad you mentioned that.

I like to map trust companies on two axes, based on the prevailing models employed by these companies. These axes also serve as guiding principles in the realization of a true trust economy.

Trust is a currency, infrastructure — not a product. It must be delivered as such. Any consumer-facing platform or directory you’ve ever used to discern trust, whether Angie’s list, Yelp, or any other, has productized trust forcing you to their platform to identify the service provider you want to hire which you may ultimately have to do through another platform or app, or even offline. This multi-step user journey creates a trust gap that ultimately constrains uptake of sharing economy services. By serving up trust recommendations as infrastructure, directly into platforms to inform their users’ decisions in real-time when they’re selecting from available service providers, we mimic the role trust in the real world.

Trust is individual, relational, contextual, and dynamic. It can’t be prescribed, only described- Most companies have taken a data-centric approach to modeling trust, rather than human-centric, framing it in terms of quantifiable scores, ratings, and confidence intervals — far from the human experience of trust — driven by personal relationships and environmental conditions. They evaluate an individual’s trustworthiness against a prescribed, monolithic standard, rather than evaluating every buyer and seller in relation to each other. Furthermore, they fail to adapt these models to reflect the complexity of the real world and the impact of external environmental factors on purchasing decisions in real-time. By evaluating trust first and foremost based on the presence/strength of users’ and providers’ relationships, evaluating buyers and sellers in context of one another rather than in absolute terms, and adjusting for sector-relevant environmental factors, we can model human trust, at the individual level, better than any existing technology.

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Jason Eisen is the Founder & CEO of UTU, an African AI & Blockchain company, dedicated to bringing real human trust to digital commerce and transforming the global sharing economy into a trust economy.