Sharing Economy Platforms Research Articles

Impact of the sharing economy on sustainable tourism practices: a comprehensive review and analysis

This study investigates the impact of the sharing economy on sustainable tourism practices through a bibliometric analysis. The purpose is to understand the evolution of research focus, identify dominant themes narrated by the help of cluster analysis using SciMat and pinpoint influential authors and institutions. Using a comprehensive bibliometric approach using Biblioshiny, the study analyses scholarly publications to map trends and patterns in the literature. Cluster analysis has been done using SciMat. The findings reveal a significant shift in research focus over time, from initial explorations of economic benefits to more recent emphasis on environmental sustainability and community impacts. Dominant themes include the role of sharing economy platforms in promoting sustainable choices, policy and regulation frameworks, user behaviour and cultural preservation. Influential authors and institutions are identified, highlighting contributions from leading universities and research centres globally. Furthermore, specific academic journals and conferences emerge as prolific publishers in this domain, providing a platform for ongoing scholarly dialogue.

The Effect of the Perception of Rental Service for Fashion Products on Consumers’ Intention to Use the Rental Service Platform: Focuse on the Customers Who Have Used Sharing Economy Platforms

This study attempted to determine the service perception and intention to use the fashion rental platform. An online survey was conducted on 300 female consumers who had experience using the sharing economy service platform, The survey period was from January 20 to January 31, 2024. For the valid response data provided by all 300 participants, factor analysis, reliability analysis, and regression analysis were performed using SPSS 28.0. The were four service perception factors for the fashion rental service platform: expressiveness, sustainability, economy, and sociability. For casual wear, expressiveness, economy, and social factors had a significant positive effect on the intention to use the fashion rental service platform, but for work clothes, expressiveness, sustainability, and economic factors were found to have the largest effect. Depending on the product group, expressiveness and sociality had a significant positive effect on the intention to use the fashion rental service platform for sports and leisure products, While there was a significant negative effect on sustainability. Expression, economy, and sociality were found to have a significant positive effect on the intention to use the fashion rental service platform for accessories and miscellaneous goods such as jewelry and bags.

Quantitative Analysis of the Future of the Sharing Economy, Housing, White-Collar Labor Markets, and Problems in Big Cities

This research project explores the future of the sharing economy and its profound effects on housing markets, white-collar labor dynamics, and socio-economic challenges in large metropolitan areas. Using quantitative economics and econometric techniques, the study evaluates how platforms such as Airbnb, Uber, and coworking spaces are reshaping urban life, exacerbating housing affordability issues, and altering labor market structures. By analyzing housing market data, labor statistics, and platform economy data from major cities like New York, London, and Istanbul, this research provides empirical insights into how the sharing economy influences urban economic landscapes. The study employs difference-in-differences (DiD) and multivariate regression models to assess causal relationships, particularly in terms of housing market disruptions caused by short-term rental platforms and labor market fragmentation driven by the rise of gig and remote work. Spatial econometric techniques are also used to explore geographic disparities in housing and employment impacts across urban districts. Preliminary findings indicate that the proliferation of sharing economy platforms has contributed to housing shortages and increased prices in central urban areas, while labor markets experience growing polarization, with high-skilled workers benefiting from remote work opportunities and low-skilled gig workers facing economic precarity. This research offers valuable policy insights into the regulation of short-term rentals and the protection of gig economy workers, highlighting the need for regulatory frameworks that address urban inequality and labor market shifts. By integrating data from multiple sources, this study contributes to the academic discourse on urban economics and provides a framework for understanding the long-term socio-economic implications of the sharing economy in big cities.

The Role of Functional and Emotional Value Co-Creation Within Sharing Economy Platforms on Repurchase Intention

Repurchase Intention is part of consumer behaviour that aspires for repeat purchases on the products or services of an organization. Consumers begin with a consideration on the necessities to purchase. Continuing this, consumers then decided on how many products will be purchases. The aim of this paper is to investigate and examine the role of functional and emotional value creation in the relationship between customer ethical perceptions and social support sharing economy platform with repurchase intention. This paper selects 402 consumers using sharing economy platforms in Indonesia and tests the regression relationships of the five constructs using Structural Equation Model with the AMOS 24.00 tool. This finding indicates that social support and consumer ethical perception showed an important antecedent towards Functional Value Co-Creation and Emotional Value Co-Creation and that the two has a positive impact of Repurchase Intention. This suggests that Functional Value Co-Creation and Emotional Value Co-Creation possess an important role as a mediator between social support and consumer ethics perception with Repurchase Intention. With a literature review related to consumer behaviour, consumer ethics, value co-creation, and sharing economy platforms, this paper proposes a unique analysis on the relationship roadmap for customer participation and consumer ethics with Repurchase Intention

Pengaruh Relationship Quality terhadap Customer Value Co-Creation pada Sharing Economy Platforms (SEP) Generasi Z di Indonesia

This study aims to obtain the empirical evidence of relationship quality dimension variables that affecting value co-creation between companies (platform owners) and consumers, related to the exchange of goods and services, the exchange of knowledge, resource, and also experience. These things are useful to provide insights for business or platform owners to accelerate growth through a collaborative environment in order to improve the overall value proposition of all parties. This study took Generation Z respondents, namely the generation that born in 1996-2011 (Lanier, 2017). There are still few previous studies related to Sharing Economy Platforms (SEP) that focuses on a particular generation. The selection of Generation Z because they have a behavioral trend that prefers to spend their money to get life experiences such as traveling. Sampling technique is using Purposive Sampling with Smart PLS analysis tool. The results showed that trust and commitment affect value co-creation of users of SEPs in generation Z.

Tourism usage of digital collaborative economy platforms in Europe: Situation, behaviours, and implications for the digital policies

This study analyses how the intensity of the use of digital sharing economy platforms has evolved in the European Union in recent years, including during the pandemic, and whether there are differences between European regions. In the digital field, work has begun on regulations and public policies that coexist with different policies in the regions and municipalities. Using spatial econometric techniques, this study provides a comparative analysis of space and time that identifies regional inequalities in terms of the intensity of demand for accommodations offered on digital sharing economy platforms. In particular, different clusters of high-intensity collaborative tourism were detected, and spatial spillover effects and interdependencies between European regions in collaborative tourism were recognised, identifying a positive spatial autocorrelation in the intensity rate of collaborative tourism. The effect of tourist destination saturation on the use of accommodation on these platforms was also observed. Several digital public policy implications were discussed, promoting regulatory coordination at the interregional and pan-European levels to avoid inequalities and imbalances across Europe.

A Non-Compensatory Index of Community Participation in Cross-Border Tourism Development Processes

We propose a composite index to measure and benchmark community participation in cross-border tourism development processes. The index synthesizes information regarding three dimensions of this construct, deemed as very important by the extant literature: residents’ engagement in the planning process and willingness to proactively welcome tourists and provide tourist services directly through sharing-economy platforms. The latter aspect is crucial to develop a local tourist supply able to combine environmental sustainability and financial feasibility in marginal areas, where public funding is scarce and private investments are unprofitable. This study offers a methodological innovation using response rates to open-ended questions to measure residents’ engagement in tourism planning. By applying the ELECTRE III algorithm, which is non-compensatory and ensures reliability in the presence of a high degree of uncertainty, survey information is aggregated in a single figure, which can be easily interpreted by destination managers and policymakers. After COVID-19, in readying for the next pandemic, decision makers should find our index as a very relevant and useful tool for tourism recovery and innovation planning, including compliance with measures to prevent the spread of future infections. We apply the proposed index to ten Croatian and Italian lands involved in a European development project. Data were collected through face-to-face interviews with residents, according to an availability sampling design. We obtained 879 valid questionnaires. The robustness of the resulting index is tested through an uncertainty and a sensitivity analysis.

Risks of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI)-assisted scams on online sharing-economy platforms

The prevalence of scams proliferating via online platforms has been identified as an emerging societal problem resulting in large-scale financial losses for victims. Online scams typically rely for their success on the generation of fake but convincing user profiles to conceal the identities of the scammers from the people being tricked into parting with their money. The increasing sophistication of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), which can produce outputs indistinguishable from real content, thus carries the risk of being adopted by fraudsters to assist in the enactment of online scams. This article considers the risks of the potential uptake and use of GenAI applications by online scammers operating in the sharing economy, with a focus on homestay-marketplace platforms and, in particular, the largest such platform, Airbnb.

Character is fate: How tourism entrepreneurs’ extraversion and agreeableness affect their market exit in the sharing economy

The rate of market exit of tourism entrepreneurs from sharing economy platforms is surprisingly high, given that the sharing business is flourishing. We argue that the destiny of performance is partly shaped by the tourism entrepreneur's personality, and explore the effect, channel, and interaction of personality traits on exit (vs. operation) with three studies. Based on a dataset comprising monthly information of 138,331 observations involving 21,556 tourism entrepreneurs and a survey experiment, our findings indicate that agreeableness decreases the exit rate whereas extraversion increases it; service quality mediates the impact. Agreeableness benefits from the contextual factor of managerial experience in the tourism industry, while extraversion benefits from restricted use policies. Moreover, extraversion leads to an operational interest trap for survival. This study is the first to unveil the intricate mechanism underlying the impact of personality traits on tourism entrepreneurs' exit and establish a novel construct known as Personality - Exit fate (PEF), which aims to stimulate tourism entrepreneurship in emerging economies.

The effects of psychological capital, work engagement and job autonomy on job performance in platform flexible employees

The performance of platform flexible employees is a core element that contributes to the rapid growth of the sharing economy platform. It is crucial to explore strategies to improve employees' performance with the growing competition among these platforms. Only a handful of research evidence has been found evaluating platform flexible employees’ psychological capital and work engagement to improve their performance. In order to remedy the gap, we draw on self-determination theory to develop a moderated mediation model, which examines how psychological capital affects platform flexible employees’ job performance. We employed hierarchical regression analysis to test the theoretical model and carried out two rounds of surveys, resulting in 474 valid paired questionnaires. The questionnaire assessed the psychological capital, work engagement, job performance, and job autonomy of flexible platform employees. The results indicate that work engagement plays a mediating role between psychological capital affects platform flexible employees’ job performance. Moreover, job autonomy moderates the mediating effect. The findings not only contribute to the literature on employees’ psychological capital and job performance, but also broaden the research scope of self-determination theory, and provide new ideas for improving the job performance of platform flexible employees.

Flowers and Bees: Spatial Network Effects in the Adoption of a Sharing-Economy Platform

This article empirically analyzes the spatiotemporal diffusion of a car-sharing platform that connects consumers with individual car owners. The authors develop a model of adoption by both consumers and providers that accommodates network effects across locations, as consumers travel to pick up cars, and information asymmetry, as only the providers’ locations are shown on a map. They apply it to data at the earliest stage of the platform and find that proximity and consumer mobility play a significant role in the spatial network effects of existing providers on consumers across locations. Consequently, the impact of additional supply at a destination on consumer adoptions at an origin varies by origin–destination pair and is asymmetric, as certain destinations draw more visitors than others and given differences in local characteristics. In contrast, existing consumers have a limited impact on provider adoptions. Through seeding experiments, the authors investigate how the geographic distribution of initial participants impacts the platform diffusion and find that targeting the supply side in big cities leads to the highest platform growth. They also use their parameter estimates to measure the long-term impact of a local promotional campaign and show that it is mostly local despite spatial network effects.

Discrimination on Sharing Economy Platforms: A Systematic Review of Cases and Coping Strategies

This paper presents a systematic review of empirical research on the phenomenon of discrimination on sharing economy platforms. Sharing platforms such as Airbnb, Uber, and BlaBlaCar have recently become notorious as hotbeds of digital discrimination. Difficult to detect and deter, digital discrimination describes the state when an online transaction is influenced by the race, gender, age, or other non-business characteristics of providers or consumers. Four key themes emerged from our analysis: forms of discrimination, domains (industries), outcomes and coping strategies. There is strong evidence of bias on both the demand side (consumers, guests) and the supply side (providers, hosts) and across domains such as accommodation sharing, ridesharing, skills sharing, and peer-to-peer lending. We propose a framework to organize the existing studies and guide future research and practical solutions to reduce inequality on online platforms.

Preventing bypass on sharing economy platforms: The impact of message framing on users’ bypass intention

Bypass happens when sharing economy users intentionally circumvent platforms’ payment process to transact directly with each other. For sharing platforms, it is a form of dark behavior that could represent a threat. This study focuses on the mitigation of bypass and whether message framing can reduce bypass, examining the impact of a negatively-framed message (highlighting risks and disadvantages associated with bypass) and a positively-framed message (highlighting benefits associated with finalizing the payment on the platform). Based on an experiment (N = 600), results show that both messages impact bypass intention significantly, especially the negatively-framed message. Moreover, our model unravels insights into some of the mechanisms underlying the effectiveness of different message frames: both messages impact directly bypass intention, however, while the negative message reduces bypass indirectly via reduced perceived economic benefit and increased perceived risk, the corresponding indirect effects of the positive message are non significant.

How Ratings Shape the Supply on Sharing Economy Platforms: A Longitudinal Cohort Study on Listing Survival on Airbnb

ABSTRACT Customer reviews on sharing economy platforms like Airbnb have been studied extensively. However, their effectiveness has recently been questioned. We investigate their role regarding listing churn on Airbnb using panel data. We find that listings with few or poor ratings will likely leave the platform. Correcting for the listings’ characteristics, we find that the best possible rating strongly predicts the listings’ success. We conclude that the best rating is a necessary but insufficient condition for success.

Uncovering Digital Platforms’ Ethics and Politics: The Case of Airbnb

The paper deploys the disclosive computer ethics (DCE) approach to reconstruct the ethics and politics of one of the sharing economy’s flagships—Airbnb. I investigate Airbnb’s technical design to identify the moral and political values that are embedded in the platform’s technology. I then analyze the platform’s ethics and politics towards a generalization of relevant ethical and political aspects by reconnecting them to the mechanisms, operations, rationales, and ideologies of the sharing economy in general. The paper contributes to the existing literature by linking between the ethics and politics of digital platforms and their technical design, using the case study of Airbnb. Additionally, it explores Airbnb as a specific platform technology with unique ethical and political values. Thus, the paper refutes the neutrality thesis and similar claims made by sharing economy platforms. Finally, the paper makes a methodological contribution to the literature on the ethics and politics of technology. It develops a practical DCE research methodology for uncovering the values, ethics, and politics of digital technologies.

It takes two to tango: The role of interactivity in enhancing customer engagement on sharing economy platforms

Engaging customers is critical for sharing economy platforms (SEPs) to sustain and grow their user base. Although the interactions between users who consume the service (customers) and those who provide it (peer service providers) are the primary source of SEPs’ economic value, little is known about the role of interactivity in driving customer engagement. This research links these two important concepts and tests the influence of interactivity (two-way communication, participation, and joint problem-solving) on customer engagement. The findings from two surveys with customers of 10 leading SEPs (total N = 1,654) indicate that two-way communication and participation, two key dimensions of interactivity, enhance engagement while joint problem-solving remains non-consequential. However, additional analyses reveal that the impact of these interactivity dimensions varies as a function of user (platform familiarity) and platform (service type) characteristics. The findings offer guidance to SEP managers seeking to improve user engagement.

The development of a C2B2C sharing economy platform: A case study of China's Airparking

The emergence of the sharing economy has led to a proliferation of novel platform-based business models in recent years. A particularly prominent type of platform is the C2B2C platform, but our knowledge of the development of these platforms is limited. Through an in-depth examination of the development of Airparking, one of China's most successful parking-space-sharing platforms, our study reveals that a C2B2C platform develops in a specific sequence across three phases, with distinct required actions and developmental outcomes. We have also identified the facilitating conditions that are conducive to this process.

Exploring the factors that influence continued use of sharing economic platforms: Insights from idle fish

This study centres on the Idle Fish platform, a prominent online marketplace for second-hand goods in China, and constructs a theoretical structure predicated on social cognitive theory and social capital theory. The quick expansion of the sharing economy has not merely catalysed economic transformation but has revolutionized consumption patterns. This research employed a survey methodology, utilizing a digital questionnaire disseminated via Credamo, which yielded 400 valid responses. The sample pool on this platform is of exceptional quality. Prior to accessing the questionnaire, the respondents must complete five perquisite prompts, which ensure their attentiveness. This procedure acts as a safeguard, ensuring the high calibre of the data collected. Employing the SmartPLS (structural equation model), the paper elucidates how self-efficacy and social trust, influenced by social referral, system quality, platform resources, community interaction, rights protection, and shared goals, drive users’ sustained willingness to utilize the sharing economy platform. The findings reveal that self-efficacy and social trust positively impact users’ willingness to persist in using the platform of the sharing economy. Furthermore, shared goals emerge as the most critical determinant of social trust. The paper accomplishes this by discussing the practical suggestions of the research findings for the platforms of the sharing economy.

Travel and tourism sharing platforms: governance and monetization strategies

ABSTRACT The emergence of sharing platforms in travel and tourism is an important transformation over the past two decades. An understanding of why some sharing economy platforms grow while others fail is an important area for travel and tourism research. Using transaction cost economics (TCE), we argue successful sharing platforms achieve both effective governance and monetization of transactions. This requires a shift from enthusiastic and committed bartering of passionate users towards a more systematic, integrated sharing platform, managed by a scaled travel or tourism corporation. The paper develops a framework explaining platform growth and offers recommendations on how transaction cost economizing and monetization can play complementary roles and can both improve platform growth and viability.

Value creation and sustainable growth of sharing economy platforms: a value network perspective

ABSTRACT This study proposes a generalised value network (VN) model for sharing economy platforms (SEP) and analyzes the internal structure and functional mechanisms by utilising sharing economy theories and corporate value creation. Platform business strategy and the development of the VN system are further discussed through the case study of a ride-hailing platform. This paper proposes that the SEP realises its own value creation and growth by creating and extending the user-centered VN. The user base is a core element of the sustainable development of an SEP, which should thus constantly strengthen its customer-centricity, information-sharing, and resource integration strategies to enhance overall efficiency and core competitiveness. In addition, sustainable growth could be achieved by exploiting the value of information data deeply and expanding as well as enriching the business ecosystem.