Guest Editorial Special Issue on Advancing Intelligent Automation in Sharing Economy

Abstract

Sharing economy refers to peer-based activities of obtaining, giving, or sharing the access to goods and services, coordinated through community-based online services. It is known as collaborative consumption that people share the services rather than having individual ownership. By leveraging idle resources to produce more goods and services, sharing economy significantly drives green consumption and sustainable development in our human society. Using information technology to provide individuals with information enables the optimization of resources through the mutualization of excess capacity in goods and services. A common premise is that when information is shared, the value of the goods may increase for businesses, for individuals, for communities, and for the whole society in general. Currently, sharing economy has potentially resulted in a great impact on citizens’ everyday life and generated huge economic benefits, e.g., Airbnb, Uber, and Amazon Mechanical Turk. A host of enabling technologies has reached the mainstream for the rise of sharing economy, including open data, the ubiquity of low-cost mobile phones, and social media. These technologies dramatically reduce the friction of share-based business and organizational models.