Trust Economy — A Primer
With an explosion of peer to peer platform businesses in the last decade, “Trust” and how to build it, scale it and maintain it has gained unprecedented importance. I wrote this article at the start of 2019 as a high level analysis of what exactly is the new “trust economy”. How businesses like Airbnb, Toptal, Craiglist and many other gig economy businesses use trust as the backbone of their platforms. I believe at the heart of success (or failure) of P2P Platforms lies the presence or absence of Trust.
Across literature and research (both management and non-management), Trust has been an elusive concept to pin down. For example, it has been described both as a noun and as a verb. Sometimes a process, sometimes a behaviour, at times a social or institutional structure. The subtle nature of the concept has led to many not defining it at all and letting the reader ascribe meaning to it.
Look at the sheer volume of meanings that the word Trust conveys, it has more dictionary meanings than do similar words like ‘co-operation’, ‘confidence’ and ‘predictable’ taken together. On average “trust” (across three dictionaries, Oxford, Random House and Websters) has close to 17 definitions whereas the others average around 4.7. Which is much closer to or as many as, the very vague terms “love” and “like”.
