Initial Interpersonal Trust as a Tool to Commercialize Couchsurfing.

      Аннотация: Reorganization to corporation in 2011 and venture investors’ backup, forces the management of Couchsurfing International to come up with a solution how to effectively monetize their user community. The author of this research proposes to look at this challenge from the perspective of initial interpersonal trust, as its presence among community’s users is essential for successful Couchsurfing operation and thus - creates value. Hence, understanding of how interpersonal trust is achieved in virtual community leads to the possible techniques of its commercialization.

Ключевые слова: CouchSurfing, interpersonal trust, peer-to-peer, Sharing Economy, virtual community, freemium business model, initial trust, community monetization, cognitive trust, affective trust