Barriers to Participation in the Sharing Economy Twenty-Second Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems, Japan 2018 1 I Won’t Share!: Barriers to Participation in the Sharing Economy Research-in-Progress Kai Spindeldreher University of Cologne Pohligstr. 1, 50969 Cologne, Germany spindeldreher@wiso.uni-koeln.de Jonas Fröhlich University of Cologne Pohligstr. 1, 50969 Cologne, Germany jfroehl6@smail.uni-koeln.de Daniel Schlagwein UNSW Business School UNSW Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia schlagwein@unsw.edu.au Abstract This research-in-progress paper reports on the preliminary findings of a study of barriers to participation in the sharing economy. We study both, the barriers to participation as a provider of a resource, as well as the barriers to participation as a consumer of a resource in the sharing economy. We conducted semi-structured interviews and used grounded theory techniques to identify barriers that have a negative impact on the likelihood of participation in the sharing economy. Preliminary findings suggest that eight barriers have a negative impact on participation in the sharing economy: Effort expectancy, independence through ownership, lack of trust, performance risk, physical risk, privacy risk, process risk, and undesired social interaction. Keywords: sharing economy, participation, barriers, motivation, qualitative research Introduction More and more businesses emerge that focus on “sharing” goods instead of selling goods (Belk 2014). These businesses are enabled by technological advancements (Botsman and Rogers 2010) and by shifts in consumer behavior towards collaborative consumption (Bardhi and Eckhardt 2012; Belk 2010). Many of these novel businesses are often subsumed under the umbrella term “sharing economy” (e.g. Hamari et al. 2015; Heinrichs 2013; Jiang 2016). In the sharing economy, transactions take place between individuals that can take the role of both consumers and providers of a resource (Filippas and Gramstad 2016). Such transactions are only made possible through digital platforms that bring together market participants and facilitate transactions among them (Puschmann and Alt 2016). The sharing economy has grown exponentially in the last decade (Andersson et al. 2013; Gutt and Herrmann 2015). Two of the most prominent examples of the sharing economy are Airbnb and Uber. Airbnb is currently valued at US$31 billion (CNBC 2017) and Uber is valued at US$68 billion (Reuters 2018). A central requirement for the success of such sharing economy businesses is mass participation (Matzner et al. 2015). However, unlike the sharing economy giants of Airbnb and Uber, many ventures that have emerged in the sharing economy fail to reach a critical mass of participating users (Täuscher and Kietzmann 2017). While several studies have been concerned with the question of what motivates individuals to participate in the sharing economy (e.g. Hamari et al. 2015; Kim et al. 2015; Möhlmann