TRUST AS A SERVICE

From retail (Etsy) to hospitality (Airbnb), there has been a rise in two-sided marketplaces in which trust is outsourced to the platform. Rather than leave it to users to vet each other one by one, the platform takes responsibility for verifying buyers and sellers in advance, thereby absorbing the risk. The effect of this is to accelerate exchange and increase participation.

For all their technological inventiveness, at bottom these platforms are little more than guarantors of trust.