Francesca Pick
Short Bio
Francesca Pick, an American citizen born and raised in Germany, is a Communication & Cultural Management student at Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen, Germany. After spending one semester abroad at California State University at Channel Islands in 2011, she will graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in September 2012. The focus of her interdisciplinary studies was organizational communication, consumer behavior and social business. Before and during her studies, Francesca interned in Germany, the USA and Italy in the fields of marketing, PR, sales and advertising and worked at the student founded agency “Spread the Word” for social business development. This sparked her interest in sustainable business models and the sharing economy. She published an article in the Journal ‘Ethnoscripts’ of the Institute of Ethnology Hamburg on organizational research in collaboration with other students and is currently writing her bachelor thesis about collaborative consumption and trust measurement.
Bachelor thesis:
How can one measure trust in the age of collaborative consumption? An analysis of trust in peer-to-peer marketplaces. The bachelor thesis gives a synthesis of the concept of collaborative consumption and the existing literature that deals with it, namely “What’s mine is yours” by Rachel Botsman and “The Mesh” by Lisa Gansky. In addition, factors that are promoting and influencing this movement, such as the shift to an access economy, technological advances and growing awareness among consumers for sustainability are briefly discussed. Secondly and foremost, the thesis examines approaches to measuring the reputation capital and trustworthiness of individuals and businesses online with theoretical concepts of trust and practical research. The research contains numerous qualitative interviews with entrepreneurs of P2P platforms, researchers, social innovators and founders of three trust aggregation companies that have recently emerged. This research has shown that there is no consensus yet on if a universal, cross-platform trust metric is necessary and what components trust measurement should consist of. It waits to be seen which solution will find acceptance in the industry and establish itself."