The origin of the sharing economy meets the legacy of fractional ownership

Abstract

The sharing economy is changing the consumption and ownership of goods. As consumption becomes more and more characterised by sharing and access-based consumption, ownership is becoming more concentrated. The literature on the sharing economy focuses almost exclusively on shared consumption practices and rather overlooks the question of ownership despite a substantial body of work on forms of shared ownership, that is, fractional ownership. In this paper, I study the extent of the linking between these two streams of work and whether they have a common conceptual base. I analyse the citations networks of these academic literatures, using the Leiden algorithm of community detection and main-path analysis. I find that the sharing economy literature originated in consumer research that debates over sharing as opposed to possession, and in work on transaction costs. I draw on the strand of work on fractional ownership and identify three sharing economy aspects: psychological ownership, anticommons and exclusion of group cooperation. The findings allow a better understanding of the characteristics of the sharing economy and open avenues for future research on fractional ownership models in the sharing economy.