Timm Teubner

• Prof. Dr.
• Professor at Technische Universität Berlin

Data is ubiquitous in today’s digitized society. However, access to and literacy in handling data plays a pivotal role in determining who can benefit from it and who can use—or potentially misuse—it. To combat inequalities and address issues such as misinformation, it is essential to enable citizens to effectively access and understand data within...

Online labor platforms have been criticized for fueling precarious working conditions. Due to their platform-bound reputation systems, switching costs are prohibitively high and workers are locked-in to the platforms. One widely discussed approach to addressing this issue and improving workers’ position is the portability of reputational data. In t...

Digital platforms facilitate the coordination, match making, and value creation for large groups of individuals. In consumer-to-consumer (C2C) online sharing platforms specifically, trust between these individuals is a central concept in determining which individuals will eventually engage in a transaction. The majority of today’s online platforms...

Platform workers can typically not take their ratings from one platform to another. This creates lock-in as building up reputation anew can come at prohibitively high cost. A system of portable reputation may mitigate this problem but poses several new challenges and questions. This study reports the results of an online experiment among 180 actual...

Purpose A growing body of research has identified time pressure as a key driver of cybersecurity (CS) risks and vulnerabilities. To strengthen CS, organizations use CS documents (e.g. best practices, guidelines and policies) intended to strengthen CS. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of how specifically time pressure is addresse...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the most relevant technologies of our time. During the last decade, AI has made major technological breakthroughs most recently in the space of generative AI. This development is enabled by an increase in computing power, a decrease in its price, and the emergence of ubiquitous computing, resulting in vast amo...

Online platforms facilitate the formation of micro-communities on the Internet by enabling exchange between locally dispersed individuals. Since all interactions are mediated through the online platform, user representation plays a critical role for such communities. Grounded in Social Exchange Theory, we report results of a behavioral experiment o...

Sustainability in tourism is a topic of global relevance, finding multiple mentions in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The complex task of balancing tourism's economic, environmental, and social effects requires detailed and up-to-date data. This paper investigates whether online platform data can be employed as an alternative dat...

Recent UI design employs regional cues such as images of iconic landmarks from the users’ region. Thus far, however, there is only limited research on the effects of regional cues on user attitudes and behaviors. Addressing this gap, we draw on Consumer Ethnocentrism Theory to study how regional cues affect users’ visual attention, perceptions of r...

Time pressure, a common phenomenon in everyday workplace environments, is an important driver for non-secure cybersecurity behaviour in organisations. Under time pressure, users are more likely to rely upon fast, affect-driven decision making, increasing their susceptibility to make mistakes and justify non-secure workarounds. This contributes to t...

Mechanism design has emerged as relevant field for information systems management. Specifically, for two-sided markets, design choices have significant effects on user behavior and thus on how supply and demand are matched. On sharing economy platforms, not only actors from the demand side, but also from the supply side must trust their respective...

Complementors accumulate reputation on an ever-increasing number of online platforms. While the effects of reputation within individual platforms are well-understood, its potential effectiveness across platform boundaries has received much less attention. This research note considers complementors’ ability to increase their trustworthiness in the e...

The platform economy has generated various new and highly successful business models. However, certain models facilitate tax evasion for service providers on their income earned on these platforms. While tax evasion contradicts the pro-social claim of many sharing platforms, it is unclear whether a provider’s tax honesty constitutes a value for con...

While previous research established that culture plays an important role in technology adoption, there is only limited work on the role of cultural appropriateness in user interface design for users from a specific background. In this study, we focus on the case of avatar design as a user interface element for facilitating positive user experience....

While regional cues are omnipresent in offline consumer life, the use of regional imagery is a still emerging trend in online retail. Applying a multi-method approach, we investigate the use of regional imagery on web interfaces and its effects on consumer behavior. We find that social, nature, and regional imagery is frequently used on energy prov...

User interfaces often utilise imagery of pristine natural environments, even if the system’s purpose and context are unrelated to nature. In this paper, we build on evolutionary psychology to develop a theoretical model for the influence of nature imagery on user perceptions of trust, visual aesthetics, and purchase intentions in a corporate sales...

Mobile health (mHealth) systems hold great potential for supporting users in self-managing disease and engaging in a healthier life. However, given the mobile context and the multiple factors that affect a person’s health, designing mHealth systems involves much complexity and a range of pitfalls. To overcome these pitfalls, scholars have called on...

Green IS research addresses the pressing challenge of climate change. In particular, leading IS scholars have called for research on the design of IS solutions that support decision making for more sustainable practices. In this sense, our research explores how ICT artifacts should be designed to support consumer decision making in favor of regiona...

Imagery represents an important tool for interface design in human-computer interaction. Pictorial cues are powerful to affect consumer trust and behavior. While social and nature cues have been subject to extensive IS research, the use of regional imagery has received much less attention. We address this gap by means of a multi-method approach com...

Purpose This paper aims to present a conceptual framework for the emerging field of green energy platform economics. Design/methodology/approach The authors develop a conceptual framework based on a careful review of the existing literature, and research into the current provider landscape and insights from academic and industry experts. The autho...

This study explores informal alliances among crowd investors, extending recent work on social networks in (equity) crowdfunding. Beyond formal alliances (such as investment syndicates), informal coordination based on social learning has proven highly relevant to the dynamics and outcomes of financing campaigns. Using data from a leading equity crow...

Online user representation (UR) is a cornerstone of platform-mediated interactions within the sharing economy. While the general usefulness of UR artifacts for facilitating online and offline interactions is widely acknowledged and understood, the underlying mechanisms and operating principles often require a more detailed analysis. In this chapter...

The Green Information Systems research stream was initiated by leading information systems researchers to address climate change through information and communications technology. This paper responds to a call for practical research into the design of information systems that support consumers in their decision making in favour of sustainable produ...

While regional cues are omnipresent in offline consumer life, the use of regional imagery is a still emerging trend in online retail. Applying a multi-method approach, we investigate the use of regional imagery on web interfaces and its effects on consumer behavior. We find that social, nature, and regional imagery is frequently used on energy prov...

Reputation systems are core components of online platform markets, incentivizing trust and trustworthiness. Small market design details may have large implications on the extent of trade and platform revenues. We selectively review our own and others’ research on the design of reputation mechanisms for platforms highlighting particular issues in th...

BACKGROUND The proliferation of mobile devices has enabled new ways of delivering health services through mobile health systems. Researchers and practitioners have emphasized that the design of such systems is a complex endeavor with various pitfalls, including limited stakeholder involvement in design processes and integration into existing system...

Background The proliferation of mobile devices has enabled new ways of delivering health services through mobile health systems. Researchers and practitioners emphasize that the design of such systems is a complex endeavor with various pitfalls, including limited stakeholder involvement in design processes and the lack of integration into existing...

Co-usage sharing involves social interactions between providers and consumers. Previous research established that individuals’ motivation to engage in such transactions are not only driven by economic factors but also by expectations about the social reward that can be gained from them. This research develops a theoretical model to understand provi...

Consumers interact with reputation signals such as star ratings in many online environments. Reputation portability has been proposed as an emerging application to leverage said signals across platform boundaries. While first research demonstrates the general trust-building potential of portable reputation, the cognitive and economic effects of sim...

This file provides supplementary material to our article published in the International Journal of Energy Sector Management: Menzel, T. and Teuber, T. (2020), “Green Energy Platform Economics — Understanding Platformization and Sustainabilization in the Energy Sector”, International Journal of Energy Sector Management

With the ever-growing popularity of sharing economy platforms, complementors increasingly face the challenge to manage their reputation on different platforms. The paper reports the results from an experimental online survey to investigate how and under which conditions online reputation is effective to engender trust across platform boundaries. It...

Today, virtually all e-commerce and sharing-economy platforms rely on star ratings or similar systems to build trust between anonymous buyers and sellers. However, star ratings can be quite tricky as a navigation aid. Platforms and users face several challenges in making sure that reputation systems remain credible. Skewed ratings and low rating va...

Assistive technology featuring artificial intelligence (AI) to support human decision-making has become ubiquitous. Assistive AI achieves accuracy comparable to or even surpassing that of human experts. However, often the adoption of assistive AI systems is limited by a lack of trust of humans into an AI's prediction. This is why the AI research co...

Cybersecurity is a growing concern for private individuals and professional entities. Reports have shown that the majority of cybersecurity incidents occur because users fail to behave securely. Research on human cybersecurity (HCS) behavior suggests that time pressure is one of the important driving factors behind non-secure HCS behavior. However,...

Cybersecurity is a growing concern for private individuals and professional entities. Reports have shown that the majority of cybersecurity incidents occur because users fail to behave securely. Research on human cybersecurity (HCS) behavior suggests that time pressure is one of the important driving factors behind non-secure HCS behavior. However,...

Establishing and curating online reputation is becoming more important and inherent in day-to-day life. Until now, a plethora of research has focused on either a) the role of reputation within given (but enclosed) platform environments or b) the general idea of data portability between platforms. However, little scholarly attention has been paid to...

Blockchain technology has reached a trough of disillusionment, especially with regard to sharing economy platforms. Following up on our reasoning in the limits of trust-free systems, we provide propositions as to why. In particular, we suggest three common misconceptions on the applicability of blockchain technology to the sharing economy as well a...

Two-sided markets are gaining increasing importance. Examples include accommodation and car sharing, resale, shared mobility, crowd work, and many more. As these businesses rely on transactions among users, central aspects to virtually all platforms are the creation and maintenance of trust. While research has considered effects of trust-building o...

Reputation has become a key factor within today's online platform landscape. In particular for sellers in electronic commerce, the management of reputation as a signal of trustworthiness has become a relevant business activity. Prior studies have focused on either the role of reputation within given (but platform-bound) environments or general data...

Online reputation represents an important driver for platform-mediated transactions. Reputation portability captures the notion of allowing users to transfer their reputation-often in the form of numerical rating scores-from one platform to another. The effectiveness of reputation as a driver of trustworthiness within platforms is well-understood....

In this paper, we present an evolutionary trust game, taking punishment and protection into consideration, to investigate the formation of trust in the so-called sharing economy from a population perspective. This sharing economy trust model comprises four types of players: a trustworthy provider, an untrustworthy provider, a trustworthy consumer,...

Communication of scarcity has emerged as a fundamental marketing principle in electronic commerce and for hospitality platforms in particular. We investigate the effect of scarcity cues on consumer behavior. First, we explore actual market data from Airbnb and Booking.com, and find that scarcity cues are used differently by hotel versus peer-based...

In many platform-mediated services, people share resources in a way that involves social value beyond mere economic considerations. Considering peer-to-peer accommodation sharing, this paper links booking intentions to hosts’ user representation (UR). We consider how the most common UR artifacts facilitate sharing through social and economic value....

Overcoming informational uncertainty and financial risk remains a challenge for crowd investors to trust and interact within the equity crowdfunding (ECF) market. Based on the theoretical lens of herding behavior, we demonstrate that visual cues in investor profiles impact the investment decision of subsequent investors. Specifically, this paper pr...

The accumulation of knowledge is key for any discipline, IS being no exception. With the number of publications, theoretical constructs, and empirical findings growing, surging demand for structuring and meta-analysis is foreseeable. We introduce DISKNET, an online platform that enables the extraction, exploration, and aggregation of construct’s de...

Computerised graphical representations of human users and computer agents, known as avatars and embodied agents, have been extensively explored and investigated in Information Systems (IS) research and practice. Such digital representations can be employed in either 2D or 3D. In order to facilitate research on user and agent representations and the...

A dataset of 2,686,354 reviews and 12,353,382 sentences posted on Airbnb from 15 cities in the United States is studied. The primary objective is to use a sentiment classifier to quantify the percentage of positive and negative reviews and sentences. Results indicate that 98.1% of reviews and 76.4% of the sentences are positive while only 1.06% of...

Purpose: A growing body of research from various domains has investigated Airbnb, a two-sided market platform for peer-based accommodation sharing. We suggest that it is due time to take a step back and assess the current state of affairs. In this paper, we hence conflate and synthesize research on Airbnb. Design/methodology/approach: To facilitat...

Contemporary C2C platforms, such as Airbnb, have exhibited considerable growth in recent years and are projected to continue doing so in the future. These novel consumer-to-consumer marketplaces have started to obliterate the boundaries between private and economic spheres. Marketing personal resources online is inherently associated with the discl...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore Airbnb’s inherent network structure emerging from transactions between hosts and guests and provide comprehensive background information on the underlying data basis. Design/methodology/approach The analysis is based on actual Airbnb data from 16 major US cities (Asheville, Austin, Boston, Chicago, D...

Two-sided platforms have gained increasing importance as a business model and research attention over the last couple of years. Examples in the consumer-to-consumer domain include platforms for accommodation sharing, shared mobility services, car sharing, resale, crowd-work, and many more. As these consumer-to-consumer business models rely on the r...

Public institutions as well as corporations seek to engage their constituents and employees in participatory processes to enhance engagement in decision-making. This paper proposes a group decision method of fusing crowdfunding and participatory budget allocation. In this approach, a central institution lets their members decide over budget allocat...

With the proliferation of information technology and artificial intelligence in society, human users have started to engage in social interactions with computer agents. In this study, we conducted a laboratory experiment in which neurophysiological measurements were used to investigate the effect of computer agents on the affective processes and be...

Contemporary e-commerce platforms enable the exchange of idle resources among private individuals directly from peer to peer. The success of peer-to-peer sharing platforms largely depends on the capability of platform providers to understand the users' motives for engagement. To investigate the relative importance of consumer motives for and agains...

Sharewashing describes a platform's act of misleading consumers by purposely portraying an image of social and ecological principles while the platform's business model does not necessarily involve them. Drawing on Corporate Social Responsibility and Green Marketing literature, we propose and evaluate a research model for investigating the impact o...

This paper investigates the impact of dynamic processes, including survivorship, as a possible rea-son for the distribution skewness of star ratings in C2C platforms. We draw on actual Airbnb data covering a time frame of 19 months from October 2015 to May 2017, comprising information on the listings’ number of ratings and average rating scores. Bu...

Employees are increasingly involved in internal corporate discussion processes, often via online platforms. On such platforms, diverse opinions converge and controversial discussions may unfold. Anonymity is assumed to encourage reticent users to speak their mind and to allow for the expression of divergent views, but it has also been found to affe...

At the tip of the hype cycle, trust-free systems based on blockchain technology promise to revolutionize interactions between peers that require high degrees of trust, usually facilitated by third party providers. Peer-to-peer platforms for resource sharing represent a frequently discussed field of application for “trust-free” blockchain technology...

The rise of peer-to-peer platforms for sharing private resources has introduced new possibilities for access beyond ownership. Although experiencing fast growth, the academic literature has only recently begun to study individual user attitudes towards such new forms of consumption. Building on findings on the underlying consumer motives for peer-t...

This is the ultimate source for anyone who wants a comprehensive view of how the sharing economy began and how it may fundamentally change capitalism across the globe. The Rise of the Sharing Economy: Exploring the Challenges and Opportunities of Collaborative Consumption examines the business phenomenon of the sharing economy, giving readers a tho...

Two-sided platforms have gained increasing importance as a business model and research attention over the last couple of years. Examples in the consumer-to-consumer domain include platforms for accommodation sharing, shared mobility services, car sharing, resale, crowd-work, and many more. As these consumer-to-consumer business models rely on the r...

Technological advances in the field of smart consumer devices such as phones, wristbands, and watches facilitate real time acquisition of physiological data, for instance, for purposes of entertainment or to improve health or performance. With recent technology, even information about another person's physiological state can be acquired unobtrusive...

Trust-free systems based on blockchain technology promise to revolutionize interactions between peers that usually require a trusted third party. As a part of a global hype around the blockchain, the sharing economy is a promising field of application for such trust-free systems. However, trust plays a crucial and complex role in sharing economy in...

The Dutch auction, also known as the descending-price auction or reverse clock auction, has a long-standing history in practice and in academic literature. In practice, the Dutch auction is commonly used to rapidly sell large quantities of homogeneous goods, such as cut flowers, fish, or tobacco. However, most e-commerce auction sites focus on othe...

Social networks – whether public or in enterprises – regularly ask users to rate their peers' content using different voting techniques. When employed in innovation challenges, these rating procedures are part of an open, interactive, and continuous engagement among customers, employees, or citizens. In this regard, assessment accuracy (i.e., corre...

Trust is a crucial prerequisite for peer-to-peer rental and sharing. Therefore, platform operators such as Airbnb have implemented a plethora of trust-building mechanisms, user interface (UI) artefacts, and reputation systems. While the role of reputation systems for establishing trust is well-understood, little is known about how reputation actual...

Open innovation has been and remains to be a rapidly changing field of research in Information Systems and various other disciplines. With the rise of professional open innovation platforms and the emergence of crowdsourcing as well as employee-driven innovation, studies on the front-end of open innovation – namely idea generation, collaboration an...

Initiators of open innovation processes involving customers or employees often face vast amounts of idea proposals. These proposals vary greatly in terms of quality, which is why organizers often engage the users themselves in the evaluation process. Building on the concept of information overload, we evaluate the effects of three distinct rating s...

Peer-to-peer platforms in the realm of the sharing economy, such as Airbnb or BlaBlaCar, have heavily rattled the electronic commerce landscape and are expected to further impact consumer behavior in the future. While trust between the parties involved is of utmost importance in such platform economies, experimental research on this aspect is scarc...

Trust is a crucial prerequisite for peer-to-peer rental and sharing. Therefore, platform operators such as Airbnb have implemented a host of trust-building mechanisms, user interface (UI) artefacts, and reputation systems. While the role of reputation systems for establishing trust is well-understood, little is known about how reputation actually t...

Environmental conditions and the interplay of cognitive and affective processes both exert influences on bidding behavior. This paper brings the above together, considering how the (external) auction environment determines the impact of (internal) cognitive and affective processes on bidding behavior, assessed in comparison to the optimal bid. Two...

Trust has been in the focus of research on business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce in the last decade. The rise of consumer-to-consumer (C2C) markets in the context of the sharing economy, however, has posed new challenges and questions regarding the dimensionality and role of trust in online transactions. We outline a conceptual research model for t...

Online participation is a powerful means of in volving citizens, members, and employees in sovereign, organizational, and corporate discussion and decision processes. However, it immanently poses the question how to deal with u ser privacy. Anonymity, on the one hand, offers user protection against repression and can free reticent members. On the o...

Governments and corporations try to engage their constituents and employees in participatory processes in order to enhance belongingness and motivation. At the same time, online-based crowdsourcing concepts have become ubiquitous. In this paper, we propose a novel concept of participatory budget allocation and sketch out an experimental design to a...

Rankings and tournaments are often used to incentivize task completion and participation in online innovation and design contests and prediction markets. One of the main challenges for platform operators is to encourage high quality contributions and effort. In this study we illustrate that in such tournaments, the participants’ ranks interfere wit...

Interpersonal trust and reciprocation are crucial factors in peer-to-peer online interactions. In order to shed more light on the association of user interface (UI) design and trusting as well as reciprocating behavior, we consider a computerized trust game with different interface background colors, red and blue, namely. We locate our work within...

As peer-to-peer coordinated products and services increasingly constitute competition for traditional businesses in many areas, understanding the underlying user motives of provision and consumption is key—not only for usiness operators, but also for researchers investigating such markets. In this article, we develop a questionnaire for assessing m...

Ride sharing allows to share costs of traveling by car, e.g., for fuel or highway tolls. Furthermore, it reduces congestion and emissions by making better use of vehicle capacities. Ride sharing is hence beneficial for drivers, riders, as well as society. While the concept has existed for decades, ubiquity of digital and mobile technology and user...

Individual risk preferences can serve as an effective control variable in order to describe human decisions and behavior. Due to limited participants’ attention and time, using standard procedures may be difficult. This paper hence proposes a risk preference elicitation task, aiming to assess individual risk preferences in experiments conducted out...

Emotions are omnipresent in our lives. They influence our health, decision making, and social interactions—bilateral as well as multilateral. Hence also modern forms of opinion building and exchange, e.g., on e-participation platforms, should consider the effects of emotions on individual and group level. Previous research on group interactions dem...

Advances in sensor technology and real-time analysis of neurophysiological data have enabled the use of live biofeedback in information systems and the development of neuro-adaptive information systems. In this article, we transfer this notion to the use of foreign neurophysiological data. We sketch out an experimental approach and research model f...