Dinara Davlembayeva, Prof Savvas Papagiannidis and Dr Eleftherios Alamanos won the best paper award for the paper titled “Reciprocity and Social Exchange in the Sharing Economy”. The paper was presented at the 18th IFIP Conference on E-Business, E-Services and e-Society (I3E Conference), which took place in Trondheim, Norway in September 2019. The presented paper focused on social and psychological factors underpinning collaborations via sharing economy platforms and shed light on the role of community-oriented motives that support the concept of sharing economic relations. The study also provided empirical evidence about the users’ perspective on the outcomes of collaborations.

I3E Conference is organised annually and has become a platform of quality research and presentations. The conference brings together contributions from a variety of perspectives, disciplines and communities for the advancement of knowledge regarding ‘Digital transformation for a sustainable society in the 21st century’. The event welcomes the research from different contexts that will contribute to the improvement of big data analytics ecosystems that emerge as drivers of digital transformation and sustainability. The aim of the I3E Conference is to answer questions around the role of data actors, define data capacities and data availability, examine adoption at leadership and management level, and improve current approaches of data-driven sustainable development.

Abstract: This study pursued two objectives: 1) it comprehensively investigated the role of the factors facilitating social exchange, reciprocity expectation and social value in use behaviour, and 2) examined the effect of the sharing economy on social inclusion and subjective well-being. The data were collected from 487 users of different sharing economy platforms in the United States. Structural equation modelling was employed to analyse the correlation of the examined variables. The results demonstrated the positive effect of egoistic belief, reciprocity norm, social value, and the negative effect of identification on the use of the sharing economy. In addition, strong relationships between use behaviour and outcomes were identified. Future research suggestions are provided.