Value co-creation in sharing service ecosystems: The role of institutional arrangements and social norms

The rise of the sharing economy as new economic model has elicited debates on the extent to which a sharing platform should intervene to coordinate sharing transactions and the degree to which user interactions should be encouraged. Starting from the service-dominant logic literature and through a vignette-based experiment, we investigate sharing platforms' institutional design choices, conceptualized as platform intermediation and consociality, and their implications for users' value co-creation in terms of users' willingness to participate and positive engagement behaviors. Building on the social norms theory and Fiske's relational models theory, we also explore the mediating effect of descriptive and injunctive social norms on the relationships between the two institutional arrangements and the two aspects of users' value co-creation. The study contributes to the literature on sharing platforms, to the study of digitally based service ecosystems, and to the body of research applying relational models theory to the sharing economy.