Is sharing really caring?

Sammanfattning: The current shift towards access-based consumption, referred to as the Sharing Economy, has been of interest for researchers and practitioners alike. Within this sharing economy, the usage of mobility services has quickly increased in popularity, especially scooter sharing. As popularity increases, so does reports regarding issues within these scooter sharing services, mainly regarding consumer misbehaviour. Scooter sharing companies struggle to efficiently manage these issues, relying on contracts as a method to deter, regulate and govern consumer behaviour. However, research shows that deterrence may have negative implications. Nudging, on the other hand, has increasingly been used as an effective method to influence consumer behaviour. In this study, we propose the use of nudging, to manage consumer behaviour and limit the negative effects of contracts. A quantitative study on 212 respondents measured the effects of 3 different nudges on psychological ownership, responsibility, perceived value, willingness to communicate and willingness to reuse, compared to contracts and how they are moderated by perceived effort and perceived incongruence. The results indicate that nudging has significantly higher impact on perceived value compared to contracts, whilst providing the same effect on responsibility. The study suggest that managers can benefit from implementing nudges to maintain consumer governance, whilst benefiting from higher perceived value by using nudging in their communication. Further, the study suggest researchers to explore other mediating and moderating factors that could potentially explain the effect of nudges in the sharing economy.