Car Sharing Versus Car Ownership: An Exploratory Examination in India

Abstract

Sharing economy is a relatively recent development in emerging economies such as India.Sharing economy has been conceptualized to include integrated collaboration in peer to peer commercial exchange of mostly underutilized goods and services for a fee, on a non-ownership basis (Altinat and Taheri, 2019)[1]; a business model consisting of a firm, primarily a service enabler such as Airbnb that acts as an intermediary between the supplier and customers of such goods and services (Kumar, et al, 2018); often referred to as collaborative consumption facilitated by online platforms (Guyader, 2018) [2]. While enjoyment and economic reward in terms of cost savings have been reported in studies as motivators for the use of such access-based services (Lee et al., 2018) [3], collaborative consumption has also been reported to being considered as an alternative ecological mode of consumption (Gopalakrishnanand Matthews,2018) [4].The two prime factors: supply-side flexibility and technology innovations have been enabling the steep growth of peer-to-peer platforms predominantly. The process of market entry for suppliers has been streamlined effectively by the technology innovations and has also made possible the searchable listings for the consumers resulting in keeping the overheads low and intact. The supply-side flexibility is yet another milestone achievement in terms of these shared platform which enables the Uber drivers to add or remove themselves from the available supply of drivers by a mere swipe of their mobile app. The same is the option for the provider who can voluntarily list or delist the offerings of their goods or services as per their wish. As an optimum solution to these problems, online shopping portals provide customers with reliable replacement policies and often refund cash in case of dissatisfaction.