Guest editorial Free

Since sharing economy is highlighted by Time Magazine as one of the 10 ideas that will change the world (Walsh, 2011), there is an increasing attention from academics and practitioners to place on the assessment of the full-range of sharing economy applications and their impacts on society. Sharing economy is intrinsically rooted in the concept of pseudo-sharing and the evolution of information technology (IT). Belk (2014) defines pseudo-sharing as a “phenomenon whereby commodity exchange and potential exploitation of consumer co-creators present themselves in the guise of sharing” (p. 7). Advocates of sharing economy does not only argue that its rapid growth has reinvented business activities and relationship between sellers and customers but also the disruptive innovation business models associated with have created tremendous economic and societal benefits.

For instance, Airbnb, a leading accommodation-sharing platform, has over three million listings on their platform, and their hosts are accommodating over 150m guests worldwide. Airbnb has changed travellers' consumption patterns, with recent estimates showing that an additional 1% increase in Airbnb listings results in a 0.05% decrease in total revenues in Texas hotel market (Zervas et al., 2017). In addition, Uber, a ridesharing platform, operates in more than 50 counties and 250 cities across the globe and its gross bookings double in 2016 to $20bn. A recent study done by Greenwood and Wattal (2017) suggests that Uber is able to reduce the rate of alcohol-related crashes in an area. As a whole, the five key sharing economy sectors – travel, car sharing, finance, staffing, and music and video streaming – have the potential to revolutionize the face of the industrial landscape with the explosive growth in global revenues, from $15bn in 2015 to roughly $335bn in 2025 (PwC, 2015). Till now, the concept of sharing economy stems from the success of accommodation and vehicle sharing and spreads widely to other sectors including logistics, food, goods, utilities, service, health, money lending, to name a few. In the service sector, over 20 service areas where the sharing economy has a presence were identified by US Department of Commerce's Economics and Statistics Administration (Ganapati and Reddick, 2018).

While recognizing the potentials of the sharing economy, firms and entrepreneurs are still encountering many social, technological, managerial, privacy and security challenges as they enter sharing domain (Slee, 2015). Whilst some interesting prior studies that investigate users' sharing behaviour in the IT platforms have been already presented and published (Dong et al., 2016), to our knowledge there is less discussion on the integral aspects of IT, people and organisation to explain the phenomenon of sharing economy. From a people perspective, for example, challenges exist regarding how to engage users and service providers using a new commercial sharing platform, and optimize their benefits accruing from the adoption of particular commercial sharing platform (Lamberton and Rose, 2012) since there are commercial benefits and possible trading value involved with in addition to the previous sharing literature. From an IT perspective, little is known about what new design features in terms of website interface and security required for sharing economy to fulfil its promise (Bae et al., 2017; Fagerstrøm et al., 2017). Moreover, we found organisation perspective on sharing economy are noticeably absent from the existing literature. There is a paucity of research in discussing how organisations or industries can benefit from the sharing practices (Habibi et al., 2017). It is also unclear what essential strategies, resources and capabilities that organisations should acquire to succeed in maximizing the value of sharing economy. Accordingly, the objective of the special issue is to refine our understanding of how IT as a tool affects sharing economy and how people (e.g. service providers and consumers) and organisations (e.g. business suppliers, platform providers and regulatory institutions) can be influenced by the sharing economy.

In this editorial, we first review some key literatures relating to the participation of individuals and organisation in sharing economy, the role of technology and the impact of sharing economy and the business model of sharing economy. We then introduce the articles appearing in this special issue.

The functioning of the sharing platform requires a critical mass of participants on both the supply side and demand side (Ganapati and Reddick, 2018). Hence, user participation in sharing economy platforms has been intensively studied from the consumer perspective, especially in accommodation and transportation sectors which are represented by Airbnb and Uber, respectively (Avital et al., 2015), with increasing intention being paid on the resource service provider perspective (Sung et al., 2018; Trenz et al., 2018).

From the consumer perspective, the 2008 economic crisis is considered as a turning point of the development of sharing economy. Collaborative consumption gained popularity due to the abundant unemployment and consumption substitution generated by the global finical crisis. This is because consumers choose to embrace sharing economy mainly because of economics reasons such as saving money, convenience and quality service (Bardhi and Eckhardt, 2012; Hamari et al., 2016).

From the service provider perspective, one of the key issues involved in the motivation of service providers is their economic orientation, i.e. for-profit and not-for-profit and the types of exchange associated with the sharing activities (Field et al., 2018). Understanding and distinguishing the incentive mechanisms for-profit and not-for-profit service providers can help for motivating service provider to participate in sharing economy platform activities (Field et al., 2018). For example, it is anticipated that people would be more inclined to participate in not-for-profit sharing economy platforms to the extent that they receive a threshold level of “intrinsic value” from doing so (Field et al., 2018).

The critical mass of market participants means that there exists fierce competition amongst them on the sharing platform (Wessel et al., 2017). Under this circumstance, service providers would need to adopt various strategies to attract consumers and stay competitive. While the reputation mechanism of the platform has been widely considered playing an important role in this sense, there are other strategies that are favoured by market participants, for example, self-branding and product description (Mauri et al., 2018). The positioning of a brand in sharing economy is an important marketing strategy to attract consumers. For example, the concepts of belongingness and uniqueness of Airbnb can affect consumers' browsing and purchasing intention, while making consumers establish a connection with the brand (Liu and Mattila, 2017). In addition, service suppliers can strategically plan the presentation of themselves and their services on the sharing platform, such as the room aesthetics, host attributes, location, room description in the room sharing context (Cheng et al., 2019; Zekan et al., 2018).

Service providers commonly use pricing strategy, especially for participants who newly join the market, they tend to lower the price charged when they first enter the market to promote themselves (Wessel et al., 2017). In this sense, the sharing platform strives to help suppliers to have dynamic pricing strategies. For example, Airbnb provides a guiding price for renters using a prediction pricing algorithm which comprehensively considers a number of factors such as type of room, type of property right, number of comments, room capacity, location, season, furniture, relative location to nearly hotels and airports, variation of local temperature (Henten and Windekilde, 2015). Uber provides a task-oriented pricing system trying to deal with the imbalance between supply and demand, which can stimulate supply while restraining demand (Gurley, 2014).

Different strategies followed by service providers are likely to result in various and actions and outcomes. For example, the provision of robust information to participants is more likely to be related to cost-based strategy than differentiation-based strategies (Clemons et al., 2019). For example, hosts describing local cultural and heritage destinations nearby the accommodation site can gain increased number of guests and revenue (Fierro and Aranburu, 2019). Also, the way Airbnb hosts' self-description strategies stimulate different consumer responses, with well-travelled hosts are likely to enhance trust and booking intention of consumers (Tussyadiah and Park, 2018). In particular, self-description on interactions and services such as the response behaviour pattern and the positive sentiment of the self-description and profile photo are helpful to attract consumers (Ert et al., 2016; Zhang et al., 2018).

The development of the sharing economy has a wide impact on the market pattern of a service, the management of organisations involved, the industry and the society at large (Chang and Wang, 2018).

Within a sharing economy context, the sharing platform helps consumers to easily access to information regarding service quality and price, reducing information asymmetry (Golovin, 2014). The platform can also help service providers and consumers save consuming costs, including the transaction cost, searching cost, information cost, negotiation cost, decision cost and supervision cost (Wessel et al., 2017). Thus, it is regarded that sharing economy can create an efficient market which is merely determined by supply and demand (Rogers, 2015).

For consumers, sharing economy provides them with diversified innovative services, which comes along with increased choices, reasonable prices and improved quality. Sharing economy brings convenience in the consumption activities, thus improving the consuming experience (Wessel et al., 2017).

For service suppliers, sharing economy stimulates the efficient use of idle assets to reduce the monopolization of the service market and to create value and promote economic growth (Wang et al., 2019). The supply of goods and services on sharing platforms could potentially substitute the demand of such goods and services provided by incumbent firms (Xie and Kwok, 2017). As a result, the pricing of the shared goods and services also can affect the performance of incumbent firms (Guttentag and Smith, 2017). For example, in the sharing accommodation context where the sharing economy mostly generates a negative impact on hotel performance, when the price gap between Airbnb listings and hotels becomes narrower, the negative impact of Airbnb supply on hotel performance becomes weaker (Xie and Kwok, 2017). In addition, sharing economy increases the diversity of goods and services in the marketplace (Geissinger et al., 2018). Meanwhile, service providers can be motivated to provide quality service due to their income is linked to consumers' comments to a certain degree (Golovin, 2014).

The sharing economy is regarded as an innovative and disruptive business model in established industries (Guttentag and Smith, 2017). The sharing economy promotes industrial transformation and structural adjustment. In the traditional economy, economic transactions are premised on the transfer of ownership of traded products (Kim et al., 2015), while transactions in the shared economy only need to temporarily transfer the right to use, and the change of consumption concept can directly promote the evolution of business model and industrial structure. For example, sharing economy impacts the value chain in the transportation service industry (Ertz and Sarigöllü, 2019).

Changes in the incumbent industry caused by sharing economy pose both opportunities and challenges to organisations within this industry. Organisations can become more flexible and cost-efficient in profitability as it is easy to join in the sharing economy market (Wessel et al., 2017). The extent to which an organisation in a specific industry can be affected by sharing economy depends on the characteristics of the organisation. For example, in geographic areas where sharing economy has a high penetration, high-end hotels tend to set high prices for an entire week while low/medium-end hotels set low price only for weekends (Roma et al., 2019). In particular, the short-term accommodation sharing business is reported to have negative impact on the revenue of traditional hotels, especially the lower-end hotels and hotels not catering to business travellers (Zervas et al., 2017).

In addition, in order to increase resource utilization efficiency, providers of different, yet related, services can consider collaboration. For example, collaborative-operation between parking-sharing and carsharing platforms can earn higher profit for the operators.

Sharing economy is regarded as an important way to realise the full advantage of resources as it is helpful in improving resource utilization and allocation (Feng, 2017). It is also considered as a possible means of achieving sustainability in terms of environment (Hamari et al., 2016). For example, sharing transportation can reduce the possession of automobile (Martin et al., 2010), petrol consumption and emission of green gap (Martin and Shaheen, 2011). Sharing economy has been found to be conducive for promoting social equity and creating employment (Feng, 2017).

However, while generating various positive outcomes, sharing economy brings some social issues. For example, although Airbnb hosts can have financial gains, social connections, cultural learning, personal growth and feelings of achievement, they also face risk, lack of privacy, emotional stress resulting from guest reviews (Zhang et al., 2019). This is because they have to provide rich information about themselves including certain identity information on the platform to enhance consumers' consumption intention through social presence and trust (Cho et al., 2019).

To ensure long-term success, a sharing platform should be operated under certain regulations on fair competition with incumbent firms (Wessel et al., 2017), which asks for the involvement of the authorities. Slowly catching up with the intensive development of sharing economy in advanced markets, sharing economy in emerging markets is found being embraced by consumers for its transparent and fair transaction process, even though it faces challenges posed by incumbent firms and the authority (Parente et al., 2018). Due to the variance in their cultural, economic and social conditions compared to developed markets, the interaction of people, technologies and organisations in sharing economy in emerging markets may demonstrate undergo different process and impacts. For example, the ridesharing service is found to have a positive impact on new car sales in China; yet the impact in USA is negative (Guo et al., 2019).

Technology plays an important role the development of sharing economy. Technologies enable people to fulfil their own consumption needs and create value for others through their sharing behaviour (Dellaert, 2019). This is because technologies blur the spatial boundary for sharing resources, which can decrease social inequality by affecting the network structure in the reciprocal resource allocation process (Shirado et al., 2019). In addition, digital technology, especially mobile applications with location sharing function, enables people to have peer-to-peer connections and generate interactions during transaction (Wessel et al., 2017). As a result, the accessibility of service is improved while the transaction cost of the sharing is reduced. Moreover, with the help of advanced technology, details of transaction data can be acquired and processed to identify opportunities to increase the business value of sharing economy (Rahman et al., 2019).

The transparency and accuracy of transactions on sharing platforms can be improved by means of, for example, user feedback system. Besides, technologies can help build trust amongst the parties involved in sharing economy by ensuring security and privacy of data, for example, by using Blockchain (Mehrwald et al., 2019; Rahman et al., 2019). The perceived interactivity of mobile apps and the particularity of the smart shared products can influence consumers' perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness of the sharing systems. (Lu et al., 2019)

Current research perspectives on technology in sharing economy, is usually mentioned without any distinct characteristics, or referred to as a process involved algorithmic or mathematical model for improving efficiency or performance, or a mechanism for resolving specific problems for increasing productivity or altering social relation, or an ensemble of technical artefacts, policies and cultures of use, and the capability or skill to leverage them in larger social contexts, or is represented by some surrogate value, including the breadth or economic impact of adoption. However, there is a lack of discussion from the perspective of sharing economy's underlying technological components which can be understood as the computational components of technology, the unique interaction between technology with existing norms, or other important contextual elements related to technology (Sutherland and Jarrahi, 2018).

Sharing economy is regarded as a socio-economic consumption, which consists of access-based consumption, peer-to-peer consumption and collaborative consumption. Kong et al. (2019) coined the term “sharing commerce” to capture the commercial nature of sharing economy, defining as aWeb-mediated consumer-to-consumer e-commerce business model where service providers transfer temporary possession of goods to customers for a fee or barter. Buyers and sellers are connected through a technology platform that has been tailored to feature social networking capabilities, handle transaction settlement and provide recourse.

We visualize the business model and its roles and relationships of the sharing commerce in the contexts of business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C), as shown in Figure 1. The roles involved in sharing commerce business model include service providers, service enablers and customers (Kong et al., 2019). From the technical perspective, in sharing commerce, service enablers utilize the consumer-to-consumer (C2C)-based digital platforms that enable many service providers to share products in a global and cloud-based highly scalable manner. Simultaneously, customers can easily search the products and interact with service providers in an efficient manner. From the social perspective, sharing commerce integrates social networking mechanisms (e.g. reward and interactive communications) within digital platform to facilitate social interactions between service providers and consumers. The mechanisms encourage consumers to generate valuable contents (e.g. ratings, reviews and recommendations) that support other peers to evaluate products during the customer journey.

This special issue consists of research articles that each has been addressed for at least two to four round reviews and revisions. These articles have selected from regions including Asia–Pacific, Europe and the United States that highlight the roles interplayed by IT, people and organisations in the context of sharing economy. These studies utilize case studies, surveys, text mining, and spatial and socio-economic approaches in investigating the phenomenon of sharing economy.

The collection of research articles in this special issue presents new insights contributing to the theory and practices in the sharing economy domain. An important staring point is the paper by Davlembayeva et al. (this issue), which provides a comprehensive understanding of the sharing economy by employing a quantitative content analysis approach. Davlembayeva et al.'s (this issue) work discovers four key findings of collaborative consumption in terms of practices, resources, drivers of user engagement and impacts, and identifies an agenda for future research. In addition to this paper, other research articles have focussed on three major research streams. These streams are (1) analytical: leveraging big data analytics techniques for developing optimal consumer experience in sharing economy platforms, (2) empirical: examining the social, technical and psychological factors that influence user participation in sharing economy platforms and (3) strategic: focussing on the service-dominant logic and social exchange theory to examine how technology-driven sharing economy achieve environmental, economic and social benefits.

Within the first research stream, Lee et al. (this issue) investigate service attributes that impact on Airbnb customer experience by analysing 169,666 online reviews posted by Airbnb users over a five-year timespan. Their findings of text mining uncover some important service attributes that influence accommodation booking intention on Airbnb. Interestingly, safety is less emphasised in the users' reviews compared with cleanliness and homeliness. In the seasonal analysis, they find Airbnb guests value the neighbourhood more in summer than in other seasons.

Within the second research stream, Wang et al. (this issue) construct a multi-relational network (e.g., producing, purchasing, rating and commenting networks) to identify the key factors influencing users' intention to purchase e-books on an online sharing platform. Through the multi-relational network analysis and machine learning approach, they find that purchasing habits and collaboration with other peers on the platform have a significant impact on users' intention to purchase e-book. Nisar et al. (2019) explore determinants that affect accommodation purchase intentions in a lodging sharing platform. The determinants they identified include perceived lodging value, perceived lodging price, lodging information, online lodging reviews, trust with the host and perceived privacy/security of the website. Using Airbnb data in New York City from 2015 to 2017, Sarkar et al. (2019) examine what motivate supply-side providers (i.e. Airbnb hosts) to participate in the sharing accommodation economy. The results of spatial and socio-economic analysis show that socio-economic factors such as gender, ethnicity, household income and occupation, and attitudes towards sustainability are the significant predictors of property listing density. This paper provides novel insights to the sharing economy platform managers, city planners and permanent residents.

Within the third research stream, Kostopulos et al. (this issue) explore the impact of sharing economy from a sociological perspective. This study improves our understanding of how technology-driven sharing economy drives social cohesion and personal relationships through using four cases studies. They conclude that conviviality and reciprocity driven by technology-enabled sharing enterprises can deliver positive environmental, economic and social benefits in society. Using a case study of Xbed (a self-service hotel platform based in Guangzhou, China), Chou and Du (this issue) answer the research question of how technologies develop value co-creation practices in the context of sharing economy from a service-dominant logic perspective. They identify the three important roles that technologies play in driving collaborative consumption practices, namely, collaborator, enabler and mobilizer. Mayya (this issue) conceptualizes sharing as a separate principle of resource allocation in the context of sharing economy and applies this conceptualization to three selected Russian sharing platforms (i.e. Darudar, Bank Vremeny and Couchsurfing). The results of in-depth interviews, along with observation data demonstrate the new paradigm of sharing relationship and the nature of exchange.

The research articles appearing in this special issue have contributed to the sharing economy literature by demonstrating the impact of sharing economy from the economic, social, and technological and environmental perspectives. To gain a deeper and richer understanding of sharing economy, the guest editors offer three suggestions for future research. First, as emerging technologies such as social media apps (as it can facilitate communications, e.g. Wang et al., 2016), Blockchain technologies, and artificial intelligence (AI) play a crucial role in driving the growth of sharing economy; future research can be focussed on examining the impact of these technologies on sharing economy, for example, how to stimulate service providers' intention to share their goods through the applications of Blockchain and how can AI address privacy and security issues from the IT design aspects in the sharing economy. Second, as users' motivation of sharing economy precipitation has been well studied, future research could take the contextual factors (e.g. the different type of sharing economy business model), cultural factors (e.g. country settings) and socio-economic factors (e.g. ageing and regional development) into consideration. Third, sharing economy research mainly focusses on the B2C and C2C contexts. The implementation of sharing economy in the B2B context has not been explored, for example, how the value of sharing economy can be co-created with stakeholders in B2B markets. Overall, we hope the future research can refine our understanding of sharing economy through the diverse perspectives.

We would like to express our gratitude to Professor Jyoti Choudrie, Professor Kevin Crowston, Professor Yulin Fang and Professor Edgar A Whitley, the Editors-in-Chief, to support and publish this special issue. The guest editors are also grateful to all the reviewers for their insightful comments and useful suggestions throughout the reviewing processes. Finally, we thank all the authors and submissions for their research works in this area.