Trust and Risk Mediate the Relation between Platforms’ Functions and Customers’ Satisfaction

For platforms to ensure value generation via users’ interaction, three fundamental functions must be performed: matching the right users with one another (match); attracting and retaining new users (pull); and facilitating their interactions (facilitate). Further, customers’ satisfaction plays a central role in enhancing platforms’ performances by stimulating positive consumers’ behaviors. Literature suggests that while trust represents a significant predictor of customers’ satisfaction, risk perception has a negative impact. The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between the platform’s fundamental functions – match, facilitate, pull - and customers’ satisfaction, and test whether they are mediated by customers’ risk perception and trust. To this aim, the paper investigates the case of Uber, by collecting and analyzing measures of risk perception, trust, customers’ satisfaction, and the three fundamental functions - match, pull, facilitate - on a cohort of Uber’s users. The results revealed that customers’ satisfaction is positively affected by the platform’s ability to match and pull users, and to facilitate their interactions; further, such relationships resulted positively mediated by trust, and negatively mediated by risk perception. These results contribute to understanding how platforms can leverage their functions to increase customers’ satisfaction, with positive outcomes in terms of willingness-to-reuse and profitability.