Background:
Digital platforms create substantial economic and social value, but they also raise institutional, regulatory, and societal challenges, including data breaches, privacy and safety issues, and concerns over the distribution of value. The benefits and challenges reveal a deeper need to understand the sharing economy and its boundaries, which had led to the development of this special issue in the Journal of Management Studies. The calls for manuscripts began late in 2016, with papers submitted by January 2018. Author teams representing 94 projects submitted their manuscripts and three years later the special issue features six insightful papers (see more below).
Definition:
The special issues defines the sharing economy as entailing digital platforms that afford users temporary access to (rather than ownership of) asset owned by others, and the accessed assets are rivalrous (or excludable) in their use. Commercial matchmakers are not new, but sharing platforms—e.g., Airbnb, Fiverr, MTurk, Uber—represent an order of magnitude reduction in commercial friction. Scaling their network effects and affording economic opportunities to a broader sector of society, digital platforms reduce commercial friction by increasing trust, subsiding information asymmetry, curbing business risk, decreasing operational complexity, and expanding distributed innovation.
Broadly, the sharing economy entails diverse platforms that assist diverse users to access diverse asset types that said platforms do not own. Assets can take many forms, and data are often non-rivalrous and thus outside the sharing economy. However, when patents, trademarks, or digital real estate in augmented reality where parcels are non-fungible and can’t be forged or replicated because excludability is enforced by law, they can be part of the sharing economy. The sharing economy entails three main actors—i.e., sharing platforms, asset providers, and users—who scale up engagement, expand trust, and reduce conflicts by smoothing coordination, aligning incentives, easing operations. The sharing economy is not independent from the “regular economy”; but like Matryoshkas, it is nested in the wider systems of exchange of goods and services.
How Platforms Create, Capture, and Distribute Value:
As a brief illustration of the sharing economy logic, this blog explains how Airbnb creates, captures, and distribute value among its stakeholders. Generally, sharing platforms create value by reducing costs and delivering non-price benefits. Cost reductions arise when a platform affords access to assets (owned by others) that could reach higher use and/or efficiency levels through automation; for example, Airbnb automated many functions for which hotels require human labor. Non-price benefits include augmented trust; simplicity; reductions in search, uncertainty, transaction, or coordination costs; and the introduction of add-on services.
Like Uber, Airbnb creates value by easing access to resources held by others and generating non-monetary benefits. However, while Uber creates value by easing access to two assets, capital (vehicles) and labor (drivers), Airbnb’s value creation derives almost entirely from access to capital (real estate). Housing is a costly asset—apartments are more than six times that of automobiles—which explains why such assets are valuable for sharing purposes. A vacant apartment is significantly more wasteful than an unused car, but higher-value assets afford more exploitation options to their owners (all else being equal).
Airbnb generates substantial non-price benefits—it reduces search and transaction costs, making the booking of a rental property as easy as booking a hotel room; prior to the platform’s launch the search costs for housing were too high, and the availability of such rentals was low. Airbnb reduces uncertainty and trust: Photos and web tools allow asset providers to display quality, and customers to search for benefits. Assurance systems, reviews, and payment and insurance protocols enable asset providers and users to transact reliably. Originally a price-sensitive, couch-sharing service, Airbnb now offers more housing options and add-on services. Airbnb Luxe, for example, features high-end listings around the world, thus bringing even greater custom-made accommodations.
The economic value created by Airbnb has been distributed more evenly to both asset providers and users as compared with Uber, where consumers satisfaction has exceeded that of asset providers. Likewise, Airbnb entices the formation of microproviders (e.g., greeting, check-in, cleaning, and emergency microservices) and it interlaces with complementors (e.g., TripAdvisor, Yelp), thus solidifying the Airbnb ecosystem.
Conclusion:
As the six articles in this special issue show, sharing platforms are economic production systems that entice engagement from diverse users and asset providers because they diversify, facilitate, simplify, and accelerate access to and monetization of assets (held by others). Sharing platforms grow in influence not only when assets are costlier, but also when they scale up their reach into the long tail and afford more equitable value capture. Of course, technology too is an enabler for scaling up supply-demand matching and for trust enhancement, both of which antecede asset sharing.
Studies in the Special Issue:
The Sharing Economy and Business Model Design: A Configurational Approach
Feifei Jiang, Xiaoying Zheng, Fan Di, Pengxiang Zhang, & Sali Li
Contextualizing the Sharing Economy
Guo Bai & S. Ramakrishna Velamuri
Assessing Trust and Risk Perceptions in the Sharing Economy: An Empirical Study
Huimin Gu, Tingting (Christina) Zhang, Can Lu, & Xiaoxiao Song
A Relational‐Models View to Explain Peer‐to‐Peer Sharing
Nicole Stofberg, Flore Bridoux, Francesca Ciulli, Niccolò Pisani, Ans Kolk, & Marlene Vock
Regulated Dependence: Platform Workers’ Responses to New Forms of Organizing
Jovana Karanović, Hans Berends, & Yuval Engel
Kam Phung, Sean Buchanan, Madeline Toubiana, Trish Ruebottom, & Luciana Turchick‐Hakak
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