Rachel Botsman

Rachel Botsman is an author, academic, and a leading expert on the impact of technology on trust. Her book ‘Who Can You Trust? How Technology Brought Us Together and Why It Might Drive Us Apart’ is lauded as an essential text on the current state of trust in the digital age. She’s also the author of books ‘What's Mine Is Yours’ and ‘The Sharing Economy’.

Rachel Botsman was born in Perth, Australia and received a Bachelor of Arts in psychology from Sydney University. She went on to earn a Master of Public Administration at the University of Oxford and in 2013 was selected as an Alex Adams Scholar at the Oxford Internet Institute.

Rachel Botsman's first book, What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, explores the movement towards a sharing economy – a model of economic activity where people are connecting in ways that don’t require them to own something. The New York Times bestseller popularized the concept of the “collaborative economy” and was named in the Top 30 Business Books of the Year by Amazon.

In her second book, The Sharing Economy, Rachel explores the rise of new platforms and business models that enable the exchange of goods and services with fewer economic and legal constraints. She paints vivid pictures of lives transformed by the sharing economy and explains how “asset owning” is essentially becoming outdated.

Her third book Who Can You Trust? How Technology Brought Us Together and Why It Might Drive Us Apart is a meticulously researched journey that explains the seismic shift in trustworthiness as a result of technology. Rachel’s found that trust can’t possibly be universal and that the paradigm of distrust being a weapon is no longer valid. Instead, she’s identified three distinct trust models - reputational, institutional and algorithmic - and mapped them to the digitally driven way we give and receive trust in the real world.

As the research and publication director at the University of Oxford’s governance and trust systems, Rachel Botsman has become a trusted advisor and educator on the use of new technologies and their effects on our trust in each other. Rachel has appeared in the media, including in The New Yorker, Wired, and The Guardian, on Al-Jazeera, ABC and CNN, and has spoken at universities around the world, including Johns Hopkins University, Stanford University and Google.

Rachel Botman is also the founder of Trust Collective, an initiative that seeks to explore issues of trust raised by new technologies and empower people to become informed participants and stewards of trust by foster balanced partnerships between humans and technology.

In 2015, Rachel received a Doctor of Business Administration for her research on the transformation of trust and was the University of Melbourne’s recipient of the Thinkers 50 Future Thinkers list in 2017.

Rachel Botsman is a global thought leader and a must read for anyone interested in discovering the power and potential of trust in the digital age. Her eye-opening and engaging books draw upon a decade of research in trust, collecting data and interviewing experts as she dissects the implications of digital trust for businesses, institutions and individuals. By understanding the forces at play, Rachel's books offer insights on how to navigate and thrive in our digitally connected world.