Sharing Economy: A Systematic Review of Definitions, Drivers, Applications, Industry status and Business models

Abstract

The rapid growth and popularity of sharing economy (SE) in recent times have led to great interest in SE from researchers around the world. The emergence of platforms such as Airbnb and Uber as dominant forces in their respective sectors has led to research on different aspects of SE. The objective of this article is to critically review existing research on SE. This review focuses on five aspects of SE: definitions of SE, drivers for SE, Application of SE, SE business models and SE industry overview. Many researchers define SE from a different perspective and there is no consensus on a specific definition of SE. However, based on the review of numerous SE definitions in literature a broad definition of SE is as follows; “SE is a model that enables sharing of goods and services between individuals or entities of underutilized resources using technology to maximize the social, economic, and environmental benefits of resource utilisation”. The drivers that are enabling the growth of SE were discussed based on 3 categories: economic drivers, social drivers, and sustainability drivers. SE has many applications in daily life and these applications can be categorized based on their function or based on their features. The business models from the e-commerce matrix, like consumer to consumer (C2C), business to business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C) that describe the business mechanism for SE platforms were also reviewed to understand the different roles of SE participants. An industry overview of the status of SE in terms of market share/output was presented along with future projections of SE sectors compared to traditional rental sectors that highlight the upward trajectory of SE platforms. Furthermore, some research gaps were highlighted based on the literature review such as the lack of research addressing the challenges associated with SE platforms among others.