Modelos de negócios disruptivos: estudo da aceitação e adoção de plataformas peer-to-peer

Abstract

Automotive and hotel companies face a significant change caused by advances in electronics, communications, and data transmission technologies. These technologies are facilitating not only new resources previously adopted by taxi drivers and hotels/inns but also new business models. Among these new models, we highlight an economy based on the exchange of capital, assets, and services between individuals, driven by the proliferation of internet-based platforms that allow people to share resources and negotiate with reasonable transaction costs. Thus, Uber and Airbnb emerged with the notions of Sharing Economy. A sharing economy is a practice of dividing the use/purchase of services facilitated mainly by using applications that allow more extensive interaction between individuals. Smartphone apps enable consumers to ignore traditional taxis and hotels, entailing a new business model. In the structure of the sharing economy, consumers and other players must accept this disruptive business model, with an innovation based on information technology and communication for it to pass from the visionary clients and reach the mass demand. It is only thus that the disruption process is possible. Therefore, the objective of this dissertation is to ally acceptance theories and the use of technology to the network externality phenomenon to understand the acceptance and diffusion of a peer-to-peer sharing economy platform (new technology-based business model). We used the network externalities with a moderating effect since we argue that this construct affects the direction and strength of the relationship between the other constructs and the purchasing intent. We justify the application of the model to all adopters through the greater interest of these companies working as a platform facilitator to capture some of these positive network externalities by charging membership or user fees. The central idea is that the diffusion process of a disruptive peer-to-peer business model is based on social influences. However, when it reaches the critical mass (network effect), these influences lose importance to other variables (such as the effort and performance expectation), which affects the defensibility of this platform model.