The Role of Identity in Access-Based Consumption

Abstract

Previous research has shown a wide range of examples of people preferring products and brands that are associated with their identity. However, most of this research has investigated consumption in the form of acquiring ownership over a product. This thesis includes three articles that investigate whether and when identity affects choices when people engage in access-based consumption within the sharing economy. In article 1, we investigate group-based discrimination in the sharing economy. Using a set of carefully controlled experiments (N = 1,599), we find causal evidence for racial discrimination. When an identical Airbnb apartment is presented with a racial out-group (vs. in-group) host, people report more negative attitudes towards the apartment, lower intentions to rent it, and are 25% less likely to choose the apartment over a standard hotel room in an incentivized choice. Reduced self-congruence with apartments owned by out-group hosts statistically mediates these effects, and discrimination disappeared when the apartment was presented with an explicit trust cue. Article 2 investigates how identity and self-relevance relates to consumer preferences for access-based consumption versus ownership. Findings from five studies (N = 2,398), indicate that strongly fashion-identified consumers tend to prefer ownership over access in the clothing domain, but that this correlational relationship is weak, and can be affected by situational factors such as the number of consumption events. Article 3 investigates how consumers using car-sharing services instead of traditional car ownership are perceived by others. We conducted a high-powered experiment in a general population sample (N = 1,194), examining whether users of car-sharing services are perceived as more trustworthy than car-owners, and whether people prefer to socialize with car-sharing users versus car-owners. The results showed that car-sharing users were only perceived as 2 more trustworthy when their motive for sharing was pro-environmental. Moderation analyses were slightly underpowered, but suggest that socialization intentions varied according to participant’s own driving behavior and environmental engagement. In conclusion, this thesis contributes to social psychology and consumer research literatures with novel empirical evidence showing the effects of social and personal identity in access-based consumption