The sharing economy: Why people participate in collaborative consumption

Abstract

Information and communications technologies (ICTs)have enabled the rise of so-called "Collaborative Consumption" (CC): the peer-to-peer-based activity of obtaining, giving, or sharing the access to goods and services, coordinated through community-based online services. CC has been expected to alleviate societal problems such as hyper-consumption, pollution, and poverty by lowering the cost of economic coordination within communities. However, beyond anecdotal evidence, there is a dearth of understanding why people participate in CC. Therefore, in this article we investigate people's motivations to participate in CC. The study employs survey data (N = 168) gathered from people registered onto a CC site. The results show that participation in CC is motivated by many factors such as its sustainability, enjoyment of the activity as well as economic gains. An interesting detail in the result is that sustainability is not directly associated with participation unless it is at the same time also associated with positive attitudes towards CC. This suggests that sustainability might only be an important factor for those people for whom ecological consumption is important. Furthermore, the results suggest that in CC an attitudebehavior gap might exist; people perceive the activity positively and say good things about it, but this good attitude does not necessary translate into action.

Green entrepreneurship in the sharing economy: utilising multiplicity of institutional logics

“…It has been often argued that the sharing economy holds the potential to facilitate restructuring to more sustainable business and consumption patterns (e.g. Cohen and Kietzmann 2014;Hamari et al 2015).…”

“…Individuals can get access to goods or services they otherwise may not be able to afford, or they can get this access in a more convenient fashion (e.g. on demand, when they need it and where they need it) (Hamari et al 2015). Second, it is a social logic.…”

“…As discussed in Sect. 2.1, it is widely held that sharing economy platforms can potentially improve ecological sustainability, which can be appealing to certain categories of potential platform users, regulators and environmentally conscious investors (Cohen and Kietzmann 2014;Hamari et al 2015;Demailly and Novel 2014;Shaheen and Cohen 2013).…”

“…, it may also give rise to more sustainable business and consumption models based on engagement with underutilised and redundant resources (Cohen and Kietzmann 2014;Demailly and Novel 2014;Hamari et al 2015).…”

“…The emerging green logic is likely to be an addition to a set of more established institutional logics (e.g. economic and social logics) which should be taken into consideration by sharing platforms to achieve their growth objectives (Hamari et al 2015). This points out to the condition of institutional complexity facing sharing platforms, where different logics may coexist, compete or blend (Greenwood et al 2011;Battilana and Dorado 2010;Binder 2007;McPherson and Sauder 2013;Zilber 2002).…”