How trust incongruence affects continuance intention in Peer-to-Peer accommodation service: transaction and consumption risks as moderators

Purpose Peer-to-Peer Accommodation Service (P2PAS) has emerged as a novel paradigm that enables consumers to book temporary accommodation through P2PAS platforms (online transaction), and then reside in hosts' rooms (offline consumption). Due to potential variance in performance and conflict of interest between hosts and platforms, consumers may differ in their trust perceptions of the two parties, which in turn affects consumers' continuous usage of P2PAS. To this end, the authors endeavor to unravel the effect of consumers' trust incongruence on continuance intention, and to further elucidate the moderating influence of transaction and consumption risks on this relationship. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned objectives. Design/methodology/approach This study collected data through an online survey of 408 P2PAS consumers. Polynomial modeling and response surface analysis were conducted to validate the hypothesized relationships. Findings Response surface analysis reveals that trust incongruence did not significantly affect consumers' continuance intention. However, continuance intention would be greater when TP was higher than TH compared with when TH was higher than TP. Furthermore, the analytical results suggest that trust incongruence exerts greater negative effect on continuance intention when transaction and consumption risks were high. Originality/value First, the study marks a paradigm shift in conceptualizing the incongruence between TP and TH as a determinant of consumers' continuance intention toward P2PAS. Second, the authors derive a typology of risks that is contextualized to P2PAS. Finally, the authors establish transaction and consumption risks as boundary conditions influencing the effects of trust incongruence on consumers' continuance intention toward P2PAS.