Sharing economy

Summary

The sharing economy is a socio-economic system whereby consumers share in the creation, production, distribution, trade and consumption of goods, and services. These systems take a variety of forms, often leveraging information technology and the Internet, particularly digital platforms, to facilitate the distribution, sharing and reuse of excess capacity in goods and services. It can be facilitated by nonprofit organizations, usually based on the concept of book-lending libraries, in which goods and services are provided for free (or sometimes for a modest subscription) or by commercial entities, in which a company provides a service to customers for profit. It relies on the will of the users to share and the overcoming of stranger danger. Origins Dariusz Jemielniak and Aleksandra Przegalinska credit Marcus Felson and Joe L. Spaeth's academic article "Community Structure and Collaborative Consumption" published in 1978 with coining the term economy of sharing.

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharing_economy

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The Advent of the Sharing Culture and its Effect on Product Pricing

Maryam Razeghian Jahromi, Thomas Alois Weber

Empirical observations suggest that consumers' propensity towards sharing varies with culture and the individuals' socio-demographic characteristics. In an economy with overlapping generations of heterogeneous consumers, we study optimal dynamic selling by a durable-goods monopolist in equilibrium. Feasible dynamic pricing strategies include second-degree price discrimination offering intertemporal consumption bundles in the form of rental and/or purchase options. We find that as the population's peer-trade propensity increases, possibly due to a cultural shift from private ownership to collective consumption, the durable-goods monopolist's optimal strategy shifts from unbundling (offering exclusively rentals), via mixed bundling (offering the options of rental and purchase side-by-side), to pure bundling (offering purchase only). We show that an increase in peer-trade propensity has an ambiguous effect on the firm's profit. Cultural shifts from low to high peer-trade propensity may be delayed by a firm's attempts to artificially disable sharing markets by offering overly low rental rates. However, beyond a certain threshold of peer-trade propensity, the firm prefers a cultural transition to an access-based economy. The underlying reason is that the asset base of a sharing economy ultimately depends on the firm's output, so that a portion of the anticipated rents from sharing can be captured by the durable-goods monopolist.

2019

To aid in the description and estimation of the tremendous recent growth in the collaborative economy, we provide a model for the dynamic sharing, subject to ﬁxed costs. The sharing economy comprises a set of inﬁnitely lived, heterogeneous suppliers, who take recurring decisions about entering or leaving the market. We provide a closed-form solution for the nonlinear evolution of the equilibrium in the sharing economy, typically resulting in an S-curve diffusion pattern. In general, the sharing economy can evolve in a nonmonotonic way, with downward adjustments followed either by a steady state or by a positive diffusion towards a steady state. The conversion costs produce a decision hysteresis for potential sharers. Unless these costs are so large that the economy rests in steady state (almost) immediately, the adjustment process does not converge in ﬁnite time.

2015

China’s Digital Diversity and the Sharing Economy in the New Era of National Sovereignty

Monique Stéphanie Bolli

2017