Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production

Abstract

loosely affiliated individuals who engage in social practices that involve contributions of the capacity of their private goods in patterns that combine to form large-scale and effective systems for provisioning goods, services, and resources. This Essay seeks to do two things. The first three Parts are dedicated to defining a particular class of physical goods as "shareable goods" that systematically have excess capacity and to combining comparative transaction costs and motivation analysis to suggest that this excess capacity may better be harnessed through sharing relations than through secondary markets. These first three Parts extend the analysis I have performed elsewhere regarding sharing of creative labor, like free software and other peer production,3 to the domain of sharing rival material resources in the production of both rival and nonrival goods and services. The characteristics I use to define shareable goods are sufficient to make social sharing and exchange of material goods feasible as a sustainable social practice. But these characteristics are neither absolutely necessary nor sufficient for sharing to occur. Instead, they define conditions under which, when goods with these characteristics are prevalent in the physicalcapital base of an economy, it becomes feasible for social sharing and exchange to become more salient in the overall mix of relations of production in that economy. The fourth Part is then dedicated to explaining how my observation about shareable goods in the domain of physical goods meshes with the literature on social norms, social capital, and common property regimes, as well as with my own work on peer production. I suggest that social sharing and exchange is an underappreciated modality of economic production, alongside price-based and firm-based market production and state-based production,4 whose salience in the economy is sensitive to technological conditions. The last Part explores how the recognition of shareable goods and sharing as a modality of economic production can inform policy. Shareable goods are goods that are (1) technically "lumpy" and (2) of "mid-grained" granularity. By "lumpy" I mean that they provision then, offers a less freighted name for evaluating mechanisms of social-relations-based economic production. 3. Yochai Benkler, Coase 's Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm, 112 YALE L.J. 369 (2002). 4. In this, my position tracks the tripartite mapping of the universe of organizational forms that resulted from the work on nonprofits in the early 1980s. See Henry B. Hansmann, The Role of

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