Abstract
Research background: There are widely recognized benefits of sharing economy for entrepreneurs and consumers. The European Commission emphasizes the importance of European countries being open to new opportunities that sharing economy brings. In order to promote the development of sharing economy, it is important to understand what factors contribute to its development.
 Purpose of the article: The presented paper aims to identify the main factors relevant for the growth of sharing economy and to determine whether there are factors which are more significant for the development of the sharing economy than others. Based on reviewed literature, the Authors compiled a set of indicators and employed them for research purposes. The selected indicators were assigned into four main groups: technological, political and regulatory environment, economic and social-cultural environment.
 Methods: The authors used two multicriteria methods (SAW and APH), which were applied to the set of indicators and modeled five different situations by attributing significance to the indicators. The Authors have applied this set of indicators for assessing the following selected countries: Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and the United Kingdom. The data covers the years 2011?2015.
 Findings & Value added: The results of the research show that technological readiness and social-cultural environment are significant for the development of sharing economy. For further research the Authors recommend the creation of a composite Sharing Economy Index (SHEI).
Highlights
Due to the increasing pace of development of sharing economy digital platforms and its impact on various fields of our life and work, sharing economy has become the subject of scientific discussion and an issue for policy makers
A European agenda for the collaborative economy describes the collaborative/sharing economy as a new business model where activities are facilitated by collaborative platforms and highlights that goods are not ‘sold’ via digital platforms, but rather allow for ‘temporary access’ to goods (European Commission, 2016)
Even though there is no common term of the phenomenon “sharing economy,” this new socio-economic model can be described as follows: “Sharing economy could be defined as multi-sided digital platforms that create an open market for services and products and act as the intermediary between users and service providers” (Grybaitė & Stankevičienė, 2016, p. 11)
Summary
Due to the increasing pace of development of sharing economy digital platforms and its impact on various fields of our life and work, sharing economy has become the subject of scientific discussion and an issue for policy makers. A European agenda for the collaborative economy describes the collaborative/sharing economy as a new business model where activities are facilitated by collaborative platforms and highlights that goods are not ‘sold’ via digital platforms, but rather allow for ‘temporary access’ to goods (European Commission, 2016). Even though there is no common term of the phenomenon “sharing economy,” this new socio-economic model can be described as follows: “Sharing economy could be defined as multi-sided digital platforms that create an open market for services and products and act as the intermediary between users and service providers” Sharing economy encompasses three groups of participants: service providers; users of these services and digital platforms, which act as an intermediary and facilitate transactions between service providers and users. 3) study, finances generated by sharing economy generated revenues of nearly 4bn euros in Europe in 2015 and facilitated around 28bn euros of transactions. A study developed by Juniper Research (2017) suggests that sharing economy will reach 40.2bn dollars in 2022
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