Consumers’ motivations and barriers concerning various sharing services

Abstract

Recently, the sharing economy has emerged as a new consumption style. Although sharing's additional environmental loads and rebound effects are concerning, it has the potential to reduce environmental loads by suppressing new production and the effective use of products. In this study, we investigated differences among consumers based on their usage experiences and future intentions, focusing on the differences among the various sharing services. We investigated consumers' motivations and barriers in two countries: Japan and Switzerland. The results showed that individuals with prior usage experience showed higher future usage intentions for the service. The motivations and barriers of individuals who had future intentions were more realistic, such as economic (price), space, quality and safety issues. The respondents with no future use intentions showed other barriers, such as “do not want to use” and “no product”, and presented more specific motivations to get additional value, such as “getting acquainted with a new person” and having an “interesting experience”. Individuals with prior experience were relatively younger and had higher “materialism” and “normative” tendencies, indicating the active and aggressive personal characteristics of sharing-service users. The comparison between the two countries also indicated that the maturity of the service, in other words, time since the service was launched, gave the difference of usage and motivation. Besides, the cultural and economic differences can also lead to different motivations and barriers as well as different levels of acceptability of secondhand-goods usage. This study revealed the influence of consumers' prior usage experiences on their future intentions to use, motivations, and barriers. We also showed that motivations and barriers can change as the service matures through the cross-national comparison between Japan and Switzerland.