Abstract
As a result of the digital revolution, new business models are emerging, and one of the most dynamic is the sharing economy. In many cases, the strategic communication of sharing economy firms is linked to current socio-economic trends, such as digital innovation, consumers’ empowerment, experience gaining (instead of stock), environmental awareness, and community building. In our research (a nationwide representative sample of 3520), we aimed to determine how open the Hungarian population is toward sharing economy services. Furthermore, we explored the relationship between openness and consumers’ socio-demographic factors, attitudes related to the current consumer trends and Internet usage habits. As a result, we found that 38.4% of the Hungarian population is open toward sharing economy services. From a socio-demographic point of view, wealthy, metropolitan, family-oriented, educated, and younger people are more open toward sharing activities. In terms of consumer attitudes, people who take risks, like having a social life, are environmentally and health conscious, spend their leisure time actively, enjoy quality things, and have a positive attitude toward digitalization are more open to using the sharing economy services. As a final result of the regression modeling, we found that the examined consumer attitudes and Internet usage habits determine openness, but socio-demographic factors largely lose their significant effect, except for generation and wealth, in the case of the integrated model. Our results show that a well-defined and relatively large segment is open to the sharing economy, and sharing economy companies could target them directly to achieve a more sustainable environment.
Highlights
The sharing economy is playing an increasingly important role in our daily lives, and there is a blurring of lines between the personal and commercial assets, consumers and producers [1]
We had multiple aims for this study: firstly, we examined the openness of Hungarian residents towards sharing economy services and how customers’ openness is affected by socio-demographic factors, different consumer attitudes, and Internet usage habits
The ratio of the respondents who are open toward different sharing economy services is: 12.3% for borrowing or lending household appliances; 15.8%
Summary
The sharing economy is playing an increasingly important role in our daily lives, and there is a blurring of lines between the personal and commercial assets, consumers and producers [1]. Centuries ago, sharing activities could be found in society [2], and the question now is why this phenomenon began to grow dynamically. As a result of the digital revolution, people in the online space can find, pay for, and value each other’s activities and quickly. The sharing economy is present in every part of our lives, be it work or leisure. The phenomenon of the sharing economy or collaborative consumption can support sustainable consumption [8,9,10,11,12] which could have long-term impacts.
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