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Objective: To examine the impact of the government communicating uncertainties relating to COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness on vaccination intention and trust after people are exposed to conflicting information., Design: Experimental design where participants were randomly allocated to one of two groups., Setting: Online., Participants: 328 adults from a UK research panel., Intervention: Participants received either certain or uncertain communications from a government representative about COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness, before receiving conflicting information about effectiveness., Main Outcome Measures: Vaccination intention and trust in government., Results: Compared with those who received the uncertain announcement from the government, participants who received the certain announcement reported a greater loss of vaccination intention (d = 0.34, 95% CI (0.12 to 0.56), p=0.002) and trust (d = 0.34, 95% CI (0.12 to 0.56), p=0.002) after receiving conflicting information., Conclusions: Communicating with certainty about COVID-19 vaccines reduces vaccination intention and trust if conflicting information arises, whereas communicating uncertainties can protect people from the negative impact of exposure to conflicting information. There are likely to be other factors affecting vaccine intentions, which we do not account for in this study., Trial Registration Number: Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/c73px/., Competing Interests: Competing interests: All authors declare: support from the Think Forward Initiative for the funding of the submitted work; no financial relationships with any organisations that might have an interest in the submitted work in the previous three years; no other relationships or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work., (© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2022. Re-use permitted under CC BY. Published by BMJ.)

The growing ecosystem of peer-to-peer enterprise - the Sharing Economy (SE) - has brought with it a substantial change in how we access and provide goods and services. Within the SE, individuals make decisions based mainly on user-generated trust and reputation information (TRI). Recent research indicates that the use of such information tends to produce a positivity bias in the perceived trustworthiness of fellow users. Across two experimental studies performed on an artificial SE accommodation platform, we test whether users' judgments can be accurate when presented with diagnostic information relating to the quality of the profiles they see or if these overly positive perceptions persist. In study 1, we find that users are quite accurate overall (70%) at determining the quality of a profile, both when presented with full profiles or with profiles where they selected three TRI elements they considered useful for their decision-making. However, users tended to exhibit an "upward quality bias" when making errors. In study 2, we leveraged patterns of frequently vs. infrequently selected TRI elements to understand whether users have insights into which are more diagnostic and find that presenting frequently selected TRI elements improved users' accuracy. Overall, our studies demonstrate that - positivity bias notwithstanding - users can be remarkably accurate in their online SE judgments., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2021 Zloteanu, Harvey, Tuckett and Livan.)

The Sharing Economy (SE) is a growing ecosystem focusing on peer-to-peer enterprise. In the SE the information available to assist individuals (users) in making decisions focuses predominantly on community-generated trust and reputation information. However, how such information impacts user judgement is still being understood. To explore such effects, we constructed an artificial SE accommodation platform where we varied the elements related to hosts' digital identity, measuring users' perceptions and decisions to interact. Across three studies, we find that trust and reputation information increases not only the users' perceived trustworthiness, credibility, and sociability of hosts, but also the propensity to rent a private room in their home. This effect is seen when providing users both with complete profiles and profiles with partial user-selected information. Closer investigations reveal that three elements relating to the host's digital identity are sufficient to produce such positive perceptions and increased rental decisions, regardless of which three elements are presented. Our findings have relevant implications for human judgment and privacy in the SE, and question its current culture of ever increasing information-sharing., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.