Natalie David, associate professor at EMSBS, recently published an article in the Journal of Business Research [CNRS cat. 2, FNEGE cat. 2, HCERES cat. A].
The article is entitled “Suppliers' loyalty to their sharing platform: The influence of multiple roles” and was written in collaboration with Oliver Rossmanneka (University of Freiburg) and Hanna Schramm-Klein (University of Siegen).
Abstract
For sharing platforms, such as Airbnb and Didi, the loyalty of suppliers (e.g., hosts and drivers) is a key success factor. We analyze the antecedents of supplier loyalty in two steps. In the first step, we formulate a baseline model that includes important antecedents of loyalty. In the second step, we explore how the antecedents of loyalty change if suppliers (a) are also customers of the focal platform or if they (b) use competing platforms (i.e., multihoming). Accordingly, we use a sample of 1,445 hosts who work with a European home-sharing platform. Our findings have several implications. First, sharing platforms should consider supplier segmentation. Second, encouraging suppliers to become customers might have several advantages for platforms. Third, it can be beneficial for a platform to focus on providing either high-quality administrative services to suppliers that prefer singlehoming or a no-frills platform to suppliers who prefer multihoming.