Follow Your Heart: The Role of Interest in the Sharing Economy

Sharing economy has gained tremendous popularity in the past decade, but little is known about providers who join these platforms out of intrinsic interest. Leveraging a proprietary dataset from a food-sharing platform, we find that interest-driven providers tend to enter the market sooner, serve dishes that are similar to those offered by competitors in the neighboring vicinity, and introduce new dishes more frequently. These strategic choices are attributed to the two aspects of entrepreneurial passion, namely identity centrality and an intense positive feeling. Heterogeneity analyses reveal that social motivations can suppress the impacts of intrinsic interests. Additionally, we demonstrate that strategies utilized by interest-driven providers effectively enhance their financial and reputational performance in the market, whereas they do not exhibit prolonged market retention. These findings offer valuable insights for policymakers, platform owners, and service providers in the sharing economy market.