Essays on trust and reputation portability in digital platform ecosystems

Digital platforms increasingly shape product and service offerings around the world, change consumer behavior, and disrupt a broad variety of traditional industries. In these digital markets, to create trust and realize transactions, platform users and businesses alike rely on their accumulated online reputation such as star ratings and reviews. With the multiplicity of existing and quickly surfacing platforms and business models, reputation portability has emerged as a nascent research topic in Information Systems and adjacent fields. From a theoretical, empirical, and practical perspective, the possibility to transfer online reputation across platform ecosystems and services is a complex and constantly evolving issue. This cumulative dissertation provides a first holistic view on central dimensions of this novel topic by investigating the foundations, the economics, and the design of reputation portability in digital platform ecosystems. At the outset, general dynamics of trust-building, reputation, and data portability are formally introduced and conceptualized. Subsequently, from a user’s perspective, the economic effectiveness of porting reputation across electronic markets is evaluated in a case study leveraging platform data and by applying survey-based and experimental research. Thereafter, technological, and legal requirements, as well as practical design guidelines to implement adequate reputation portability mechanisms, are derived. Throughout, this work considers the broader societal implications for individuals’ digital sovereignty and identity management in online environments and, finally, concludes by providing an outlook with avenues for future research.

Author dc:creator

• Hesse, Maik

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Teubner, Timm

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Identifier URI

http://dx.doi.org/10.14279/depositonce-11679

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:depositonce.tu-berlin.de:11303/12879