Beyond Uber and Airbnb: The Social Economy of Collaborative Consumption

Abstract

The growing collaborative consumption movement has evolved significantly in the age of Web 2.0. While much of the research has focused on its economic aspects, there are also practices that have gone largely unnoticed. This article illustrates the range of these practices by proposing a typology that accounts for the various currencies exchanged and digital technologies used to promote sharing of goods and services. This article focuses on the social aspects of the collaborative consumption movement to construct a full picture of the concept. It presents a case study of an Australian grassroots community group, MamaBake, which promotes the communal cooking and sharing of meals between mothers, and shows that even non-monetary currencies, such as the shared norms of reciprocity used by MamaBake, can be stigmatizing under certain circumstances. In doing so, it imagines alternative manifestations of the collaborative consumption movement that go beyond market orientation and instead focuses on promoting soft, non-economic values.

Algorithmic governance: A modes of governance approach

“…This may create unintended consequences. Apart from allegations surrounding Uber and Airbnb (sexual assault, privacy breaching, and other serious criminal offenses), there are also cases of phishing, free-riding, and other types of social dilemmas (Martin et al 2015;Hartl et al 2016;Rowe 2017). Rule-based mechanisms have been created to prevent conflict emerging in these instances.…”

“…This is very different from community and user-based platforms that do not employ algorithms to enhance their performance. Platforms like MamaBake (Rowe 2017) or Freegle (Martin et al 2015) preserve the primary features of co-governance. They provide a convenient structure for interested parties to meet and engage with each other directly (via messaging, posting boards), without algorithmic intermediation.…”

Sharing Economy: Promote Its Potential to Sustainability by Regulation

“…Consumption is often oriented toward expansion, beyond practicality, causing tremendous pressure on the resource and environmental systems [23] and forming a so-called "frugal paradox". However, the sharing economy abandons "ownership" for a "use"-oriented consumption logic, provides consumers with more purchasing options [30] without burden of ownership and reducing transaction costs [31] than traditional products, and makes consumers rethink their purchase behaviors and actual demand, leading to consume with a sense of purpose [23,32], which makes consumption return to practicality and reduces the threshold of consumption to take utility as a consideration. Under this logic, consumers can increase their utility by consuming the services undertaken by the shared products to satisfying their real needs rather than constantly buying new goods so that excessive consumption can be avoided, while producers and platform operators can provide consumers with truly efficient services rather than with more brand new products.…”

Being ready for the next Uber: can local government reinvent itself?

“…The debate concerning Uber and the pre-existing market (taxis and PHVs) reflects several standpoints: Uber is variously seen as innovative and entrepreneurial [20] themes to which we shall returnand malign (see, for example, [25,45]). Some commentators (e.g.…”

“…A further lens through which the Uber story has been told relates to the sharing economy [5,54,55], the company often characterised as an exemplar in the context of a general proposition that the sharing economy is a "good thing". Whether Uber really is part of the sharing economy is moot and depends in large part on the prevailing definition of the term [14,42,45]. With the exception of UberPOOL, where strangers share a vehicle, Uber's services do not appear to demonstrate a greater degree of sharing than conventional taxi/PHV, wherein a driver "shares" the use of her/his vehicle with a paying customer.…”