Sharing Economy as Innovative Paradigm Towards Sustainable Development: A Conceptual Review

Abstract

Sharing economy has been widely described by scholars as diverse phases towards sustainable development concerning its concept, functions, and goals in recent studies. Historically, the concept of "new capitalism" has been aroused the widespread concerns by scholars when defining the concept of sharing behavior of idle resources back to the year 1961. Moreover, scholars considered further the theoretical perspectives of sharing economy from the year 1978 to 2005. And many scholars started conducting the empirical analysis with the impact of sharing economy on specific industries such as tourism, hotel, mobility and financing sectors by the year 2010. However, there were still only a few scholars studied the field of sustainable development of sharing economy particularly in the mobility sectors and potential implication addressed the implementation of governing policies regarding case of the Chinese government. This article is first to review the previous studies on overall development of sharing economy in current situation, conceptualizing and providing the new sustainable model of sharing economy (particularly in sharing Mobility), led to further address the sharing economy in which regarded such an innovative paradigm towards sustainable development concerning with reviews and empirical studies conducted by previous scholars. Significantly, this study provided significant references to the stakeholders (operators), consumers (users), and administering (Chinese government) the sharing platform such potential issue, bringing the government concerned. Theoretically, it also provides such a new research direction with the sustainable model of sharing economy and potential regulating issues for the future research.

Foundations of consumption and production in the sharing economy

“…Numerous theories exist to study the sharing economy (Table 4). For example, Expectation-confirmation theory Oliver [48] Balachandran and Hamzah [5] Legitimacy theory Dowling and Pfeffer [19] Hwang [27] Self-determination theory Deci and Ryan [18] Hamari et al [23] Social exchange theory Homans [25] Hossain [26] Technology acceptance model Davis [17] Liu and Yang [40] Theory of planned behavior Ajzen [2] Hawlitschek et al [24] Theory of reasoned action Fishbein and Ajzen [21] Lamberton [30] Value-percept theory Westbrook and Reilly [60] Pu and Pathranarakul [53] the commitment-trust theory [45] can be adopted to explain the commitment and trust relationship among consumers and producers in the sharing economy [6]. The expectation-confirmation theory [48] can be applied to explain how consumer and producer expectations of the sharing economy are form and why the confirmation of those expectations leads to sharing behavior [5].…”

Diffusion of Innovation in Technological Platforms: The Uber Case

“…This characteristic makes the diffusion of this kind of innovation more complex (Matzler, Veider, & Kathan, 2015). The greatest challenge for peer-to-peer technological platforms is the necessity of designing intermediation systems capable of integrating organic and economically independent entities (Pu & Pathranarakul, 2019). For Chen, Yang, and Liu (2004), if suppliers' and clients' needs are not balanced, the system will become unbalanced and eventually collapse.…”

“…However, such platforms need to balance peer-to-peer relationships (Bresnahan & Greenstein, 2014;Matzler et al, 2015). This balance is necessary to ensure the proper fit between offers (drivers) and consumers (passengers) and ensure peer-to-peer platform diffusion (Chen, Yang, & Liu, 2004;Pu & Pathranarakul, 2019). Otherwise, the system will unbalance and eventually collapse (Parker et al, 2016;Rochet & Tirole, 2003;Sundararajan, 2016).…”

Reconceptualizing and modeling sustainable consumption behavior: A synthesis of qualitative evidence from online education industry

“…Human society is facing significant challenges, and various industries are looking for ways to reach sustainability (Pu & Pathranarakul, 2019). Currently, developing countries are considering sustainable consumption behavior (SCB) more than developed countries (Lai, 2011).…”