Marketing in the Sharing Economy

Article

Giana M. Eckhardt, Mark B. Houston, Baojun Jiang, Cait Lamberton,

Aric Rindfleisch, and Georgios Zervas

Abstract

The last decade has seen the emergence of the sharing economy as well as the rise of a diverse array of research on this topic both

inside and outside the marketing discipline. However, the sharing economy’s implications for marketing thought and practice

remain unclear. This article defines the sharing economy as a technologically enabled socioeconomic system with five key

characteristics (i.e., temporary access, transfer of economic value, platform mediation, expanded consumer role, and crowd-

sourced supply). It also examines the sharing economy’s impact on marketing’s traditional beliefs and practices in terms of how it

challenges three key foundations of marketing: institutions (e.g., consumers, firms and channels, regulators), processes (e.g.,

innovation, branding, customer experience, value appropriation), and value creation (e.g., value for consumers, value for firms,

value for society) and offers future research directions designed to push the boundaries of marketing thought. The article

concludes with a set of forward-looking guideposts that highlight the implications of the sharing economy’s paradoxes, matura-

tion, and technological development for marketing research. Collectively, this article aims to help marketing scholars not only

keep pace with the sharing economy but also shape its future direction.

Keywords

access-based consumption, competition, consumer behavior, digital platform, marketing and society, marketing strategy, prosu-

mer, regulation, sharing economy

At its core, marketing enables exchange between buyers and

sellers (Bagozzi 1974). Traditionally, these exchanges have

involved the permanent transfer of ownership. However, the

digital revolution has enabled buyers and sellers to exchange

offerings that increasingly render temporary access rather than

permanent ownership (Kumar, Lahiri, and Dogan 2018). This

revolution has proliferated across a wide range of products and

services, including transportation (e.g., Lyft), lodging (e.g.,

onefinestay), clothing (e.g., Rent the Runway), financial ser-

vices (e.g., Transferwise), food services (e.g., Deliveroo), and

office space (e.g., WeWork). Given its impressive growth, it is

not surprising that the sharing economy has been heralded as a

global transformation (Wallenstein and Shelat 2017a) and has

gained considerable interest from scholars both within (e.g.,

Bardhi and Eckhardt 2012; Zervas, Proserpio, and Byers

2017) and beyond (e.g., Arvidsson 2018; Schor 2016; Sundar-

arajan 2016a) the marketing domain.

Since Rifkin’s (2000) seminal work on technology-based

sharing platforms, academic literature on the sharing economy

has blossomed (for a review, see Perren and Kozinets [2018]).

However, prior research appears to downplay the sharing econ-

omy’s transformative potential and instead largely views this

growing trend from the lens of our traditional market economy.

For example, Lamberton and Rose (2012) use classic market-

ing concepts (e.g., perceived risk, familiarity, utility) to predict

whether consumers select a shared offering. Likewise, Kumar,

Lahiri, and Dogan (2018) provide a set of marketing prescrip-

tions for sharing economy entities using an adapted version of a

customer acquisition and retention model developed for tradi-

tional ownership-oriented firms. Furthermore, most studies in

this domain try to explain the activities or impact of a particular

sharing economy firm, such as Uber (Cramer and Krueger

2016), Airbnb (Zervas, Proserpio, and Byers 2017), or Zipcar

Giana M. Eckhardt is Professor of Marketing, Royal Holloway University of

London (email: [email protected]). Mark B. Houston is the Eunice &

James L. West Chai r in Marketi ng, Texas Christian University (email: m.b.

[email protected]). Baojun Jiang is Associate Professor of Marketing,

Washington University in St. L ouis (email: [email protected]). Cait

Lamberton is Alberto I. Duran Presidential Distinguished Professor of

Marketing, Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania, USA

(email: [email protected] ). Aric Rindfleisch is John M. Jones

Professor of Marketing, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (email:

[email protected]). Georgios Zervas is Associate Professor of Marketing,

Boston University Questrom School of Business (email: [email protected]).

Journal of Marketing

2019, Vol. 83(5) 5-27

ª American Marketing Association 2019

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/0022242919861929

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(Bardhi and Eckhardt 2012). In summary, although the litera-

ture on the sharing economy provides important insights, it is

often narrow and conventional in its focus.

Our goal is to enrich and extend prior research in this

domain by examining the sharing economy’s disruptive poten-

tial for marketing’s traditional beliefs and practices. We begin

by offering a broad and inclusive definition of the sharing

economy and identify its key characteristics. We then explore

the degree to which these characteristics, such as access instead

of ownership, challenge the foundations of existing marketing

thought, which are deeply rooted in the concept of resource

ownership. Specifically, we first examine how the sharing

economy questions important marketing institutions such as

consumers, firms and channels, and regulators. We then

explore how it affects the optimization of key marketing pro-

cesses such as innovation, brand management, the customer

experience, and value appropriation. We follow with an exam-

ination of how the sharing economy alters our traditional views

of value creation for customers, firms, and society. Our article

concludes with a set of forward-looking guideposts that aim to

help marketing scholars predict where the sharing economy is

headed and better understand its implications. Our hope is that

our definition of the sharing economy, examination of its

impact on our traditional view of marketing, and future-

oriented guideposts will encourage scholars to move beyond

current assumptions and frameworks to offer significant dis-

coveries that have the potential to shape the future of marketing

thought and practice on the sharing economy.

What Is the Sharing Economy?

To understand the impact of the sharing economy, we must first

define it for a marketing context and explain the ways in which it

may differ from the traditional market economy. In developing

our definition, we first examined prior research’s efforts to

define this domain (see Table 1). As this table shows, many of

these definitions revolve around a common set of characteristics.

First, prior definitions widely recognize that the sharing

economy offers temporary access as an alternative to perma-

nent ownership (e.g., Bardhi and Eckhardt 2012; Kathan,

Table 1. Sharing Economy Definitions.

Source Definition

Lessig (2008, p. 143) “Collaborative consumption made by the activities of sharing, exchanging, and rental of

resources without owning the goods.”

Bardhi and Eckhardt (2012, p. 881) “Transactions that may be market mediated in which no transfer of ownership takes place.”

Lamberton and Rose (2012, p. 109) “Marketer-managed systems that provide customers with the opportunity to enjoy product

benefits without ownership. Importantly, these systems are characterized by between-

consumer rivalry for a limited supply of the shared product.”

Botsman (2013) “An economic model based on sharing underutilized asserts from spaces to skills to stuff for

monetary or non-monetary benefits.”

Heinrichs (2013, p. 229) “Economic and social systems that enable shared access to goods, services, data and talent.

These systems take a variety of firms but all leverage information technology to empower

individuals, corporations, nonprofits and government with information that enables

distribution, sharing and reuse of excess capacity in goods and services.”

Stephany (2015, p. 205) “The value in taking underutilised assets and making them accessible online to a community,

leading to a reduced need for ownership.”

Kathan, Matzler, and Veider (2016, p. 663) “This so-called sharing economy phenomenon is characterized by non-ownership, temporary

access, and redistribution of material goods or less tangible assets such as money, space, or

time.”

Sundararajan (2016a, p. 23) “The sharing economy is an economic system with the following five characteristics: largely

market based, high impact capital, crowd based networks, blurring lines between the

personal and professional, and blurring lines between fully employed and casual labor.”

Puschmann and Rainer (2016, p. 95) “The use of an object (a physical good or service) whose consumption is split-up into single

parts. These parts are collaborative consumed in C2C networks coordinated through

community-based online services or through intermediaries in B2C models.”

Habibi, Kim, and Laroche (2016, p. 277) “An economic system in which assets or services are shared between private individuals, either

for free or for a fee, typically by means of the Internet.”

Hamari, Sjoklint, and Ukkonen (2016, p. 2049) “The peer-to-peer-based activity of obtaining, giving, or sharing the access to goods and

services, coordinated through community-based online services.”

Frenken and Schor (2017, pp. 4–5) “Consumers granting each other temporary access to under-utilized physical assets (‘idle

capacity’), possibly for money.”

Narasimhan et al. (2018, p. 93) “The recent phenomenon in which ordinary consumers have begun to act as sellers providing

services that were once the exclusive province of ordinary sellers.”

Arvidsson (2018, p. 289) “A new arena of economic action that builds…on common resources that are in themselves

not directly susceptible to market exchange.”

Perren and Kozinets (2018, p. 21) “A market that is formed through an intermediating technology platform that facilitates

exchange activities among a network of equivalently positioned economic actors.”

6 Journal of Marketing 83(5)

Matzler, and Veider 2016; Lessig 2008). In accord with prior

research, our definition also acknowledges that sharing plat-

forms provide access to both tangible and intangible resources,

including physical products such as automobiles and homes, as

well as less-tangible assets, such as money, space, or time

(Kathan, Matzler, and Veider 2016, p. 663); services, data, and

talent (Heinrichs 2013, p. 229); and ideas and knowledge

(Bouncken and Reuschl 2018). Many of these definitions also

acknowledge that access is gained through either economic

transactions or quid pro quo exchanges (e.g., Arvidsson

2018; Botsman 2013; Habibi, Kim, and Laroche 2016). Thus,

the sharing economy entails economically motived access

(Eckhardt and Bardhi 2016) rather than socially motivated

sharing (Belk 2010).

Sharing economy transactions are also typically mediated

by technology platforms that allow sharing activity to be scaled

by efficiently matching (or connecting) providers and users

(e.g., Perren and Kozinets 2018; Puschmann and Rainer

2016; Stephany 2015). In addition, extant definitions often

conceptualize the sharing economy as a “system” (e.g., Hein-

richs 2013; Lamberton and Rose 2012) in which customers take

on enhanced roles as both providers and users of resources

(e.g., Hamari, Sjoklint, and Ukkonen 2016; Narasimhan et al.

2018). Sharing economy scholars often refer to these customers

as “prosumers” and suggest that this system may allow excess

capacity to be more fully utilized (e.g., Botsman 2013; Frenken

and Schor 2017; Heinrichs 2013). Finally, prior research sug-

gests that the resources (both tangible and intangible) accessed

through sharing platforms may be crowdsourced (e.g., Nara-

simhan et al. 2018; Sundararajan 2016b). Thus, the sharing

economy blurs the lines between personal versus professional

and between a fully employed workforce versus casual labor

(Sundararajan 2016b).

Although prior definitions have identified some of the vital

components of the sharing economy, no single definition has

articulated the entire set of characteristics needed to fully cap-

ture the nuances of this emerging domain. Thus, we synthesize

these characteristics and define the sharing economy as

“a scalable socioeconomic system that employs technology-

enabled platforms to provide users with temporary access to

tangible and intangible resources that may be crowdsourced.”

Using this definition as our foundation, we develop a set of

seven key characteristics for classifying a wide range of sharing

economy entities along a continuum that reflects the degree to

which an entity is part of the sharing economy. We propose that

five of these characteristics (outlined previously) are defining

of the sharing economy (i.e., temporary access, transfer of

economic value, platform mediation, expanded consumer role,

and crowdsourced supply). We also identify two additional

characteristics that are typical of many sharing economy firms

but may also be found in some traditional market economy

entities (i.e., reputation systems and peer-to-peer exchanges).

This continuum is displayed in Table 2; Panel A applies this

continuum to the automobile sector, while Panel B applies it to

the financial sector. As this table shows, although some entities

(e.g., BlaBlaCar) display all of characteristics of the sharing

economy, others display only a few (e.g., Zipcar). Thus, our

continuum recognizes the diversity in this domain and

acknowledges that some firms are more archetypal of the shar-

ing economy than others (Perren and Kozinets 2018). This

continuum also highlights the extent to which a particular

example of the sharing economy challenges our traditional

view of marketing. For sharing entities near the right-hand side

of Table 2, traditional beliefs and practices should be quite

applicable. For these entities, existing frameworks can likely

be augmented to incorporate their new strategies and tactics.

However, as firms take on more characteristics of the sharing

economy (moving toward the left-hand side of Table 2), new

conceptual frameworks or major revisions of existing theories

may be required.

We begin with the five definitional characteristics of sharing

economy entities. First of all, in the sharing economy offerings

are temporarily accessed rather than permanently owned (e.g.,

Bardhi and Eckhardt 2012). For example, as outlined in Table

2, BlaBlaCar allows consumers to gain the benefits of riding in

another consumer’s car for a fixed period of time without

transfer of ownership. Second, this access involves economic

transactions or quid-pro-quo exchanges that transfer value from

one entity to another (Kumar, Lahiri, and Dogan 2018). This

act of value transfer distinguishes sharing economy transac-

tions from activities that involve more informal sharing activ-

ities that lack exchange value, such as giving a friend a ride

with no expectation of payment (Belk 2010). Third, the sharing

economy is defined by reliance on a platform (often internet

based) that identifies appropriate matches between providers

and users of resources and facilitates their exchange (Perren

and Kozinets 2018). Thus, renting a car from Avis is not part of

the sharing economy because of Avis’s direct engagement

without platform mediation. Fourth, the sharing economy

expands the role of consumers, typically seeing them take on

roles from both the “demand side” and the “supply side” of the

economic equation (Jiang and Tian 2018). For example, Uber

reframes consumers as taxi drivers, and Zipcar requires mem-

bers to clean and prepare cars for the next user. Thus, in the

sharing economy, consumers are often categorized as prosu-

mers (Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010). Fifth, among archetypical

sharing economy entities (e.g., BlaBlaCar, Uber), supply is

crowdsourced from many individual consumers. For example,

Uber drivers pool their time and resources to constitute an

aggregate supply.

In addition to these five defining characteristics, some shar-

ing economy entities possess two additional (i.e., typical) traits:

reliance on a reputation system and a peer-to-peer relationship

among resource providers and customers. Although these two

characteristics may be typical, they are not distinct or exclusive

to sharing economy entities. For instance, although Uber orig-

inally depended on peer-based resources, today a ride through

Uber may be provided in an automobile that is owned by Uber

itself. Moreover, some entities that rely heavily on both repu-

tation systems and peer-to-peertransferarenotpartofthe

sharing economy. For example, seller and buyer reputation and

peer-to-peer transfer are critical features of eBay; however,

Eckhardt et al. 7

eBay does not meet the five main criteria for inclusion in the

sharing economy. We next explain the impact of these key

sharing economy characteristics on our traditional definition

of marketing.

How Does the Sharing Economy Affect Our

View of Marketing?

According to the American Marketing Association (AMA

2013), marketing is defined as “the activity, set of institutions,

and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and

exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients,

partners, and society at large.” Our investigation into the

impact of the sharing economy focuses on the three core com-

ponents of this definition (i.e., institutions, processes, and value

creation). Across these three components, we focus on ten

specific topics (marketing institutions: consumers, firms and

channels, and regulators; marketing processes: innovation,

brands, customer experience, and value appropriation; and

value creation outcomes: value for consumers, firms, and soci-

ety). For each topic, we offer a summary of key changes that

occur as a result of the sharing economy. This is followed by a

set of future research directions, which are summarized in the

Appendix.

Marketing Institutions

As noted in the AMA definition, traditional exchange takes

place among a set of marketplace institutions. According to

Vargo and Lusch (2004), marketing has traditionally viewed

institutions as entities that “made goods available and arranged

for production” (p. 1). As detailed by Gundlach and Wilkie

(2009), the phrase “institutions and processes” implies that

institutions such as manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, and

marketing research firms are an important part of the marketing

domain. In this section, we focus on three types of institutions

Table 2. Sharing Economy Continua

A: Automobile Sector

Archetypal Sharing

Economy ŁŁŁ

Nonsharing

Economy

BlaBlaCar

Uber with

Consumer’s

Car

Uber with

Uber-Owned

Car

Subscription Car Access (e.g.,

Zipcar)

Rental

Car

Loaning Car to

Friends or Family

Defining Characteristics

Access oriented PP P P P P

Economically substantive PP P P P

Technology-based matching platform PP P P

Enhanced customer role PP P P

Crowdsourced supply PP

Typical Characteristics

Reliance on reputation system PP P

Customer and resource owner are

peers

PP P

B: Financial Sector

Archetypal Sharing

Economy Ł

Nonsharing

Economy

Peer-to-Peer Lending

(e.g., LendingClub)

Crowdsourced, Bank-Mediated

Lending (e.g., bnktothefuture.com)

Traditional Bank

Lending

(e.g., Wells Fargo)

Defining Characteristics

Access oriented PPP

Economically substantive PPP

Technology-based matching platform P

Enhanced customer role P

Crowdsourced supply PP

Typical Characteristics

Reliance on reputation system PP

Customer and resource owner are

peers

8 Journal of Marketing 83(5)

and examine how our understanding of them may be altered by

the sharing economy: (1) consumers (i.e., entities that consume

offerings), (2) firms (i.e., entities that create offerings) and

channels (i.e., entities that facilitate access to offerings), and

(3) regulators (i.e., entities that govern the exchange of

offerings).

Consumers

Key changes in the sharing economy. At first glance, it may seem

somewhat odd to consider consumers a marketing “institution.”

Indeed, Gundlach and Wilkie (2009) do not include consumers

in their list of marketing institutions. However, as noted previ-

ously, in the sharing economy, consumers take on expanded

roles, many of which were previously assigned to institutions.

For example, ride-sharing providers “consume” their car and

also “produce” a service for those who ride along. In essence,

this conversion of consumers into institutional actors can be

viewed as a transformation from “choosers and users” to

“prosumers” (Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010). Moreover, in the

sharing economy, prosumers may be both a producer and a

consumer (e.g., the same person may be a Lyft driver on Sun-

day and a rider on Monday). These prosumers take on a variety

of traditional firm roles such as communication, promotion,

and quality control. For example, a Lyft rider may coordinate

with the driver before pickup (Etherington 2018), enhance the

platform’s profile by providing a rating (Jenkins 2018), and

expand the value of the experience by sharing with others on

social media (Cava 2017). Likewise, peer-to-peer lending plat-

forms such as LendingClub enable consumers to provide funds

to one another and even use them to screen loan applications

(Vallee and Zeng 2018). Thus, in the sharing economy, con-

sumers may take on institutional roles that are typically con-

ducted by firms in the traditional economy.

Future research directions. The impact of the sharing economy on

consumer roles presents an opportunity to reassess many tradi-

tional consumer research topics. First, consider the topic of

consumer decision making. To date, this literature has focused

on decision-making strategies and biases that drive the con-

sumption of goods that are owned (e.g., Huber, Payne, and Puto

1982; Park and Lessig 1981; Shiv and Fedorikhin 1999). Thus,

an important question is, What types of judgments, heuristics

and biases affect the consumption of shared (as opposed to

owned) resources? The sharing economy’s unique characteris-

tics are likely to introduce a new set of heuristics and biases

that may affect consumer decision making. To point to a few

opportunities, traditional influences such as need (“If I’m going

less than ten miles, I won’t drive my own car”), brand (“buy

generic but only access name brands”), product type (“buy

hedonic, access utilitarian”), or lay theories (“people only share

things they don’t care about”) may take on new meaning when

resources are accessed rather than owned.

Likewise, decision-making scholars who study self-

regulation have found that consumers’ ability to forgo short-

term pleasure in the interest of a long-term goal (i.e.,

intertemporal discounting) is dependent on a variety of factors

including individual differences, the length of delay, and the

amount at stake (Soman et al. 2005). However, it is unclear

how intertemporal discounting operates when an offering is

accessed rather than owned, or when a consumer becomes a

prosumer. For example, should the substitution of an accessed

indulgence (i.e., driving a luxury car) be considered a failure of

self-control or a success? Is the decision to enter one’s goods

into a shared system an act of self-regulatory triumph, or might

it represent the acceptance of unwise risk?

A second important question is, What drives consumer satis-

faction in the sharing economy? Consumer satisfaction and

loyalty have been examined from a variety of perspectives,

ranging from Oliver’s (1980) expectancy-disconfirmation

model, to Bolton’s (1998) dynamic model that focuses on the

relationship between customers and service providers, to hid-

den Markov models that classify customers over the course of

their experience with a firm (Netzer, Lattin, and Srinivasan

2008). The degree to which established findings from these

models apply to consumers engaged in the sharing economy

is largely unknown. Thus, the sharing economy presents an

opportunity for marketing scholars to reexamine customer

satisfaction from a new vantage point that accounts for its

unique aspects, such as the enhanced role of the customer and

its crowdsourced supply.

For example, traditional models of consumer satisfaction

focus on the consumer’s role as a user of products or services.

However, in the sharing economy, consumers may also be

product and service providers (i.e., prosumers) and often eval-

uate their users. These evaluations may have an important

impact on a user’s future access to (and costs of) shared prod-

ucts and services. Thus, in the sharing economy, consumers not

only are evaluating satisfaction but also are being evaluated.

The degree to which this inversion affects consumer attitudes

and behavior opens up a wealth of research opportunities. For

example, it would be interesting to assess the correlation

between the satisfaction ratings that consumers provide and

receive within a sharing platform. As a starting point for this

reexamination, we suggest that consumer behavior scholars

consult Fournier and Mick’s (1999) classic work in this

domain, as it offers a framework for understanding consumer

satisfaction as a result of consumer–product interactions that

are holistic in nature and embedded in sociocultural settings.

A third research question is, How does consumer identity

affect the sharing economy experience? While the prosumer

role may be natural for some consumers, others may prefer

more traditional roles. A consumer’s degree of comfort with

new roles is likely to depend strongly on identity complexity

(Hannah, Thompson, and Herbst 2018). For example, consu-

mers who can easily identify as a financial expert may be more

comfortable engaging in the risk inherent in a peer-to-peer

lending platform. Alternatively, other consumers may enact

traditional consumption norms even when interacting with

sharing economy entities, such as taking (rather than making)

a loan on LendingClub. Furthermore, some consumers may

lack the training and skills to assume these types of institutional

Eckhardt et al. 9

roles. A lack of consumer comfort with the prosumer role may

taint their sharing economy experience and create a sense of

conflict (Liu et al. 2019). Thus, research that identifies the

characteristics of prosumers and their degree of comfort with

various levels and types of prosumer responsibility would

enrich knowledge in this area. What strategies can sharing

economy firms employ to foster prosumer identities, and how

should these roles be managed? For example, should the pro-

sumer role be carefully scripted or allowed to emerge more

gradually?

Firms and Channels

Key changes in the sharing economy. In addition to altering our

view of consumers, the sharing economy may also change our

understanding of firms and channel providers (Benkler 2017).

Typically, a firm deploys human, physical, and financial

resources to create and market a set of offerings, which then

flow through a channel of marketing intermediaries to reach

end users. The transactions are typically governed by financial

concerns and often influenced by the relative power of the

transacting parties (Carson and Ghosh 2019). This system of

transactions takes on a different flavor in the sharing economy.

For example, due to their reliance on crowdsourcing and/or

prosumers, most sharing platforms have fewer employees and

more limited assets compared with traditional firms. Thus, they

are more likely to leverage external providers rather than inter-

nal resources to create offerings and use these providers (rather

than intermediary firms) to distribute them (Kumar, Lahiri, and

Dogan 2018). As a result, the sharing economy creates unique

challenges unlikely to be faced by traditional firms. Because

platforms do not typically produce offerings, they cannot con-

trol quality or guarantee consistency. As evident from their

peer reviews, some drivers on ride-sharing platforms and prop-

erty owners on room-rental platforms provide services that fall

short of customer expectations. Moreover, platforms may also

struggle to retain quality service providers who use the plat-

form opportunistically. For instance, as noted by Zhou et al.

(2019), highly skilled in-home nurses may use a sharing plat-

form to identify potential clients and then continue to transact

with them outside of the platform.

Thus, in the sharing economy, individual providers have high

levels of agency but are not employees or franchisees of the

platform. Hence, they are not subject to legitimate power or

authority (Hazee, Delcourt, and Van Vaerenbergh 2017). As a

result, tight ex ante contracts cannot fully govern provider beha-

vior and ex post influence attempts by the platform may also be

ineffective (Carson and Ghosh 2019). Moreover, sharing plat-

forms typically do not own or control the quality of services-

capes (Bitner 1992) in which resources are delivered. These

distinctions between sharing platforms versus traditional firms

and channels provide several intriguing research opportunities.

Future research directions. Given the lack of control that sharing

platforms have over service provision, an important institu-

tional future research question is, How can sharing platforms

ensure quality? The complexity of the task of ensuring quality

is magnified by a sharing platform’s reliance on a large number

of decentralized providers (who may enter and leave the shar-

ing system at will), and the many and varied servicescape set-

tings in which users are provided access to a resource (vs.

centralized and standardized firm-owned stores). For example,

scooter sharing platforms such as Lime must try to provide a

quality experience under conditions in which a prior user has

left one of its scooters in a dark alley in a bad part of town. At

one level, future research could provide insights into the scope

and pervasiveness of these challenges. For example, do

“turnover” rates of providers on sharing platforms differ

greatly from the turnover of traditional firm retail employees

or retail partners? How pervasive is platform exploitation by

which providers and users utilize the platform solely to find an

initial match, and does this phenomenon cut across product or

service type? What characteristics of sharing servicescapes

(e.g., location, timing, degree of privacy) most affect user

satisfaction?

Future research could also offer platforms new ways to con-

ceive of and manage the process of ensuring quality. Because

providers and users are not traditional employees, new theory is

likely needed to answer these questions. Although research in

the franchising domain may offer some helpful insights (e.g.,

Antia, Mani, and Wathne 2017), the sheer number of providers

on most sharing platforms significantly alters the scale of mon-

itoring and control that goes far beyond a typical franchise

setting. Because sharing platforms often try to inculcate a sense

of community among providers and users, it is tempting to

imagine that cultural norms could provide adequate govern-

ance and ensure quality. However, because the desire for com-

munity appears to be lacking in most sharing platforms, it is

unlikely that norms have the strength necessary to control qual-

ity (Belk, Eckhardt, and Bardhi 2019). Perhaps the notion of

control itself must be reconceptualized in the sharing economy

to account for its particular characteristics (Jaworski 1988).

Alternatively, can scholars design new systems for an ex ante

selection of providers to deliver quality and remain loyal? This

topical domain is ripe for field experiments that test theory-

driven strategies for managing quality. For example, the issue

of reducing defection and opportunism by providers (and users)

could be examined through experiments that compare the effi-

cacy of platforms using incentive-based approaches (e.g., a

downward-sliding scale for repeat transactions) versus value-

based approaches (e.g., enhanced support such as offering

training or equipment to loyal participants).

An issue for future research that spans consumers, firms, and

channels is, How does the sharing economy alter our under-

standing of marketplace institutions at a collective level?

These three institutions are components of an interrelated

market system with roles that are traditionally clear-cut: firms

produce output that consumers desire and channels funnel that

output between firms and consumers. However, in the sharing

economy these roles become blurred. Thus, the way in which

sharing economy actors respond to these roles may differ

compared with the traditional economy. For example,

10 Journal of Marketing 83(5)

consumers may be more likely to forgive service failures in

the sharing economy because they realize that the prosumers

who deliver these services are real people like themselves

(rather than anonymous firms).

The sharing economy may also create unique challenges, as

consumers, firms, and channels must adopt new roles and take

on new responsibilities. Thus, theoretical lenses, data sources,

and analytical methods that account for this role complexity

among both the individual components as well as the systems

in which they are embedded would be especially valuable

(Hoffman and Novak 2017). This approach is likely to force

researchers out of the lab, inspire partnerships across disci-

plines and methods, and prompt the acquisition of new skills.

For example, complexity science (Holland 2014), which

focuses on systems of interacting components that produce

emergent outcomes, may offer a useful theoretical frame to

assess the interrelated roles of sharing economy participants.

This approach has been broadly applied in biology, sociology,

and economics but has been underutilized in marketing (Wood-

side 2015). Likewise, given the embeddedness of the sharing

economy actors, network analysis could be employed to assess

the roles, relationships, and information flows within sharing

platforms as well as the degree of influence and tie strength

among its actors (Van den Bulte and Wuyts 2007). Both

approaches would likely require access to longitudinal and

geolocated data. While challenging, these types of investiga-

tions would significantly enhance understanding of the roles

and influence of customers, firms, and channel members in the

sharing economy.

Regulatory Entities

Key changes in the sharing economy. “Regulatory entities” refers

to laws and policies used to influence actions that affect con-

sumer, firm, and competitive outcomes. As with prior eco-

nomic disruptions, the sharing economy poses fundamental

challenges to existing legal frameworks (Anderson and Huff-

man 2017). Issues regarding whether sharing economy firms

and transactions can be effectively regulated commingle with

policy decisions regarding whether they should be regulated. In

response, regulators at every level of government are debating

the impact of regulating sharing markets such as lodging and

transportation. Open questions remain regarding the extent to

which these marketplaces should be treated as traditional firms

when it comes to matters of regulation, ranging from labor, to

consumer health and safety, to discrimination (Edelman, Luca,

and Svirsky 2017). For example, local zoning laws that regulate

traditional hotels may need to be revised to govern Airbnb.

Likewise, a lack of regulation allows Lyft to treat its drivers

as independent contractors rather than employees.

Because regulatory institutions are part of the marketing

system, these new sharing platforms present important chal-

lenges for marketing scholars and offer an opportunity to

explore a new type of institutional entity. For example, incum-

bent firms have argued that Uber and Airbnb are no different

from traditional taxi and hotel companies and should be

regulated as such to maintain a level playing field (Kemp

2017). In contrast, these platforms cast themselves as interme-

diaries that facilitate peer-to-peer transactions rather than tra-

ditional providers that sell to consumers (Zervas, Proserpio,

and Byers 2017). Moreover, they propose that their online

reputation systems help ensure quality standards and protect

consumers and that added regulation would stifle innovation

and reduce consumer welfare (Northrup 2016). This debate

seems highly relevant to researchers interested in how public

policy intersects with both market structure and competition.

Future research directions. The regulatory challenges posed by

the sharing economy reveal several important questions. A

good starting point is, What is the role of existing regulations

and policies in governing sharing economy activities? For

example, little is known about the effectiveness of the review

systems currently employed by most sharing economy plat-

forms in terms of self-regulation relative to government regu-

lation. Furthermore, research is needed to determine if and how

these reputation systems should be regulated (Zuboff 2019).

Perhaps there are specific contexts in which self-regulation

works and others where government intervention is required

(Farronato and Zervas 2018)? For example, self-regulation may

be more effective for sharing platforms that have a large number

of users and providers as well as those that face stiff market

competition. Moreover, while ratings systems are helpful, they

are far from perfect signals of trustworthiness and present a host

of issues such as bias, forced intimacy, and inflated ratings

(Filippas, Horton, and Golden 2018). Thus, research is needed

to document the relative effectiveness of alternative governance

mechanisms, such as direct enforcement by platforms (e.g.,

financial penalties, restricted access), financial investments by

users (e.g., deposits, mutual ownership), and network effects of

reputation markets (Akerlof 1970).

Traditionally, market exchanges have been governed not

only by regulatory entities but also by trust (i.e., belief in the

reliability and intentions of a partner). Indeed, external regula-

tion is mainly required under conditions in which a low degree

of trust fosters opportunism among exchange partners (Chiles

and McMackin 1996). Trust becomes even more important in

the sharing economy due to the digital anonymity underlying

most ratings systems (Botsman 2017b). However, little is

known about the nature of trust and its role as a regulatory

institution in the sharing economy, as the bulk of marketing

research in this domain was conducted prior to the rise of

sharing platforms (e.g., Moorman, Deshpand´e, and Zaltman

1993). Thus, an important question is, What is the nature of

trust in the sharing economy, and to what degree can it regulate

sharing economy transactions? From a consumer perspective,

is the trust engendered by reputation systems as strong as con-

sumers’ trust in formal regulators? From a regulator perspec-

tive, to what degree can regulators have confidence that public

interest is protected by the reputations of platform brands and

of individual providers within platforms? A conceptualization

of the role of trust in the sharing economy would provide a

valuable foundation for creating new systems for trust building

Eckhardt et al. 11

that go beyond consumer reviews and that might reduce the

need for government regulation.

In addition to understanding the role of regulatory mechan-

isms in the sharing economy, marketing scholars should also

ask, How should policy entities balance the costs and benefits

of implementing sharing economy regulation? Specifically,

what is the right amount of regulation, and which external

entities should do the regulating? On the one hand, regulators

should consider issues such as protecting consumers and cre-

ating a level playing field for both new and incumbent com-

petitors (Gandini 2019). These concerns could likely lead to

increased regulation of the sharing economy. On the other

hand, regulators must balance these concerns against the ben-

efits that sharing platforms deliver. For example, Airbnb’s entry

has resulted in lower hotel prices and increased choice options

for consumers (Farronato and Fradkin 2018; Zervas, Proserpio,

and Byers 2017). Likewise, Uber provides the benefits of flex-

ible work arrangements (Chen et al. 2017) and improved

resource usage efficiency (Cramer and Krueger 2016) and may

increase consumer welfare (Cohen et al. 2016). Moreover, car-

sharing services such as Turo appear to both increase product

quality and enhance consumer welfare (Jiang and Tian 2018;

Tian and Jiang 2018). Collectively, these benefits may dissuade

regulators from placing added restrictions on sharing platforms.

Although prior research has provided evidence for both positive

and negative outcomes from regulation, these studies tend to

examine these outcomes in isolation. Thus, future research is

needed to determine the net impact of those regulations by asses-

sing not only the benefits created by a regulation but also its

costs. This type of research could be approached through an

array of methodologies, including analytical modeling,

survey-based, and archival research techniques.

In addition to how sharing platforms should be regulated,

another interesting question is, Who should regulate the shar-

ing economy? Many issues and concerns surrounding the

sharing economy (e.g., fair labor laws, appropriate taxation)

appear to demand attention beyond the local government

level. To complicate matters further, regulatory institutions

at all levels of government appear to be unsure of the pros

and cons of regulatory policies aimed at sharing economy

firms (Brescia 2016). Thus, scholarly research that docu-

ments, explains, and predicts the outcomes of various policy

choices by regulators at different levels of government would

be of considerable value.

Marketing Processes

According to the AMA’s definition, marketing processes

involve “creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging

offerings.” These processes are critical for firm success (Gun-

dlach and Wilkie 2009). Thus, firms place considerable impor-

tance on managing each of them. In this section, we examine

the impact of the sharing economy on the effectiveness of

managing four types of marketing processes: (1) innovation,

(2) branding, (3) customer experiences, and (4) value

appropriation.

Managing Innovation

Key changes in the sharing economy. As noted by Drucker (1954),

firms have two essential functions, marketing and innovation.

Indeed, innovation is a central theme for both marketing

thought and practice and can be broadly defined as creating

offerings that are different and valuable in the marketplace. Our

traditional view of innovation is tightly connected to the market

economy and views firms (sometimes with the aid of users) as

the primary developers of innovative new offerings and the

center of business models (Chandy and Tellis 2000). However,

based on its unique characteristics and nature, the sharing econ-

omy will make it necessary for marketing scholars to rethink

innovation. Specifically, the sharing economy’s unique char-

acteristics challenge marketing’s tendency to focus on product

innovation and to favor breakthrough innovation over incre-

mental innovation.

Future research directions. An important first question is, What is

the role of product innovation in the sharing economy? The

pursuit of differentiation through product innovation is widely

regarded as a basis for success in the traditional market econ-

omy. In contrast, the sharing economy has heavily relied on

business model innovation (i.e., various ways in which plat-

forms extract value by enabling transactions between providers

and users) rather than on product innovation (Kumar, Lahiri,

and Dogan 2018). This lack of product differentiation is evi-

denced by the fact that some sharing economy platforms

employ products that are largely identical. For example, the

Chinese scooter manufacturer Ninebot supplies products to

both Lime and Bird. Likewise, many cars used for Uber are

also registered on Lyft. Research is needed to determine

whether conditions exist under which product innovation by

platforms could create value (for consumers and/or the plat-

forms). In short, is there a role for product innovation by plat-

forms in the sharing economy?

Instead of relying on product differentiation, innovation in

the sharing economy appears to center on improving the under-

lying platforms on which these products are offered. Specifi-

cally, sharing platforms aim to enhance their ability to match

the differentiated goods and services offered by their providers

with the unique needs of their users to better provide enhanced

benefits, lower price, and/or greater convenience (Dellaert

2019). Future research should continue to search for ways to

improve the effectiveness and/or efficiency of platform match-

ing mechanisms. Scholars should also try to isolate the relative

efficacy of different technology-enabled models that platforms

can employ to identify, attract, retain, and grow desirable pro-

viders and users (Kumar, Lahiri, and Dogan 2018). In sum-

mary, it appears that the sharing economy is shifting the

locus of innovation away from products and toward platforms

and their business models.

The changing role of product innovation raises a related

question: What is the relative role of radical versus incremental

innovation in the sharing economy? Historically, scholars have

focused on radical innovation, given its important role in terms

12 Journal of Marketing 83(5)

of creating firm value and disrupting markets (e.g., Sorescu,

Chandy, and Prabhu 2003). The sharing economy challenges

the very distinction between these two types of innovation.

Scholars have traditionally assumed that innovation type is a

strategic decision undertaken by the firm based on its internal

capabilities (Sorescu, Chandy, and Prabhu 2003). However, in

the sharing economy, consumers have instant digital access to a

portfolio of offerings that they often cocreate. For example, 3D

printing technology allows consumers to use a sharing platform

(e.g., Thingiverse) to download a product design (often made

by another consumer) and digitally remix this design to an

incremental or radical degree before converting it into physical

form (Rindfleisch, O’Hern, and Sachdev 2017). As a result, in

the sharing economy, incremental and radical innovation may

both become routine activities performed by consumers (rather

than just firms) and may not be as distinct from one another as

commonly thought. As a result, the sharing economy presents

an opportunity for innovation scholars to consider new innova-

tion typologies (Lessig 2008).

This shift in perspective away from firms engaged in radical

product innovation and toward platforms that leverage existing

products in new ways raises a fundamental question: What are

the drivers of innovation in the sharing economy? At present,

innovation scholarship has largely attributed innovation activ-

ity to successfully leveraging a firm’s set of internal resources,

capabilities, or processes (Vorhies and Morgan 2005). For

example, resource-capability theory suggests that innovative

firms possess a set of valuable endowments and skills that

enable them to create innovative new offerings that are difficult

to replicate by their competitors (Hunt and Morgan 1995). This

characterization seems considerably less applicable to sharing

economy firms, which typically possess few unique resources.

As shown by Xiong and Bharadwaj (2011), young technology

start-ups appear to be particularly reliant on leveraging

resources from larger and more established forms through alli-

ances and relationships. Indeed, most sharing platforms have

emerged from small start-ups in which the creators possessed

far fewer resources and capabilities than the incumbent firms in

the industries they aim to disrupt. Instead, what these start-ups

seem to possess is the willingness to exploit new opportunities

and the ability to look at an established industry from a fresh

perspective. These capabilities enable successful start-ups to

effectively leverage the resources they acquire from estab-

lished partners. Thus, compared with traditional firms, success-

ful innovation in the sharing economy may depend more on

external resource exploration than internal resource exploita-

tion. Research capable of providing a comparative assessment

of the relative value of these two different resource strategies

across both traditional versus sharing economy firms would be

especially valuable.

Finally, intriguing questions remain regarding innovation by

traditional firms in the sharing economy. Does the relative

importance of key product attributes (e.g., status vs. durability)

differ between products that a consumer buys for personal

consumption versus a product that a prosumer plans to (also)

share with other users? For example, consumers who plan rent

out their cars on Turo may place more emphasis on durability.

The answer to this question has important implications for how

traditional firms approach innovation in the wake of the sharing

economy. Likewise, should traditional firms also consider

engaging in business model innovation by participating in the

sharing economy? For example, some car manufacturers (e.g.,

GM, Volvo) have partnered with car-sharing platforms such as

Turo to make it easier for owners to rent out their automobiles

or have created their own sharing platforms to offer short-term

rentals (Jiang, Tian, and Xu 2018).

Managing Brands

Key changes in the sharing economy. Collectively, the branding

literature views brands as valuable assets to be protected and

managed by a firm and clearly communicated to prospective

customers (Keller 1993). However, brands appear to play a

substantially different role, and thus may be more difficult to

manage, in the sharing economy. For example, there is a nota-

ble difference between platform brands (e.g., the Rent the Run-

way brand) compared with the brands that can be accessed

through those platforms (e.g., Prada, Gucci, Louis Vuitton).

Prior research has shown that sharing economy brands play a

lesser role in forming one’s identity, and create lower levels of

brand attachment, compared with brands that are owned

(Bardhi and Eckhardt 2012, 2017). This weakened role of tra-

ditional brands seems to be compensated for in part by the

growing strength of platform brands. For example, Bardhi and

Eckhardt (2012) suggest that platform brands exude a savvy

and environmentally friendly aura. Thus, the sharing economy

appears to be disrupting traditional notions about the nature and

value of brands. In addition, those tasked with delivering the

brand experience are rarely employees of the company (e.g.,

Airbnb hosts), which raises questions about how to ensure

consistent, high-quality delivery (Sundararajan 2014, 2016b).

Future research directions. Traditional brand management

revolves around engaging consumers with brands to obtain

favorable outcomes such as increased loyalty, positive word

of mouth, and enhanced revenues (Fournier, Breazeale, and

Avery 2015). One important way that firms enhance engage-

ment is by cultivating a strong brand community (Muniz and

O’Guinn 2001). However, the effectiveness of such tactics in

the sharing economy may be limited, as much of our knowl-

edge about brand communities is based on an assumption of

brand ownership. Indeed, research by Bardhi and Eckhardt

(2012) reveals that consumers are reluctant to form commu-

nities around brands that they access rather than own. Building

on this insight, we suggest that although brands may lose some

power as consumers access whatever is easily available

through a sharing platform, the brand of the platform might

actually gain power as consumers rely more heavily on the

platform itself.

Thus, an interesting question is, Do communities form

around sharing platform brands? If these communities do not

form, what other tools can brand managers use to create

Eckhardt et al. 13

engagement with platform brands? There is anecdotal evidence

that Uber and Lyft riders show low levels of brand loyalty, as

consumers frequently switch between the two platforms to get

lower prices. In response, both platforms have recently intro-

duced programs to incentivize consumer loyalty (Reynolds

2019). Future research could examine whether these types of

programs are effective for sharing platforms and how they may

best be designed for sharing economy experiences. For exam-

ple, given the sharing economy’s inherent social nature, loyalty

programs that emphasize prosocial opportunities (e.g., dona-

tions to local nonprofits) may be a particularly effective tactic.

Alternatively, because most shared resources are accessed

through a technology-enabled platform, loyalty programs that

involve time-sensitive, experiential, and technologically deliv-

ered perks (e.g., Amazon’s flash deals) may also be quite

appealing. A framework that may be especially fruitful for

reexamining ideas surrounding brand community in the sharing

economy is the notion of brand publics (Arvidsson and Calian-

dro 2015). According to this framework, in an online environ-

ment, brands take on a more ubiquitous nature and are less

likely to cultivate the type of social formations typically found

in traditional brand communities.

Luxury branding, in which brands are distinguished by price

and exclusivity (Keller 2009), is another future research oppor-

tunity. Because the sharing economy lowers price and increases

access, sharing platforms seem incongruent with luxury brands.

This raises the following question: What are the prospects of

luxury branding for the sharing economy? Although shared

brands may be difficult to brand as luxuries, consumers’ desire

for distinction through brands may be revealed in different

ways. For example, as luxury goods become more widely

accessible through sharing platforms, personalized experiences

may represent a more unique way of distinguishing oneself and

crafting a sense of identity. Thus, in the sharing economy,

brands that represent exclusive experiences may be better able

to deliver status benefits compared with brands that follow the

traditional dictum of exclusive (and high-priced) offerings. If

luxury brands become more about experiences than objects, it

seems likely that sharing platforms may begin to position and

price themselves as facilitators of luxury experiences. For

example, onefinestay positions itself as the luxury alternative

to Airbnb by virtue of the concierge service it offers to supple-

ment its property inventory. Airbnb plans to fight back by

launching a new service rumored to be called “Airbnb Luxe”

that will also focus on providing enhanced experiences that can

benefit from the authenticity that comes with local partnerships

(Spinks 2018). This type of positioning is a radical departure

from current sharing platform branding, which tends to position

on price, convenience, or sustainability. Future research that

examines the paths that sharing platforms brands take as they

migrate into luxury would be especially valuable.

Finally, given its potential disruptive effect on traditional

branding strategies, another topic ripe for future research is

brand value: What types of value do sharing platform brands

provide their users? For example, WeWork, one of the fastest-

growing brands in the sharing economy space, provides shared

workspaces around the world that can be accessed through

membership. Although start-ups and freelance workers may

seem like this brand’s obvious target, many traditional firms

that have their own workspaces are buying WeWork member-

ships for their employees and trying to “WeWork-ify” their

own offices (James 2017). These memberships allow their

employees to accrue network capital (Urry 2007) by working

in a shared space, learn new ideas from interacting with indi-

viduals from other organizations, and take advantage of the

social programs that WeWork provides. As this example

shows, a sharing economy brand’s actual value may differ from

its intended value. In addition, its brand’s use value (i.e., the

value derived from its tangible features; Bardhi and Eckhardt

2017) and network value (i.e., its “capacity to engender and

sustain social relations with those people who are not necessa-

rily proximate and which generates emotional, financial and

practical benefit” [Elliott and Urry, 2010, p. 58]) appear to

be more important than its symbolic value. Thus, the way mar-

keting scholars think about and measure brand value should

encompass all three of these types of value (Keller 1993).

Managing the Customer Experience

Key changes in the sharing economy. In addition to managing

brands, traditional firms also manage customer experiences

across all touch points along the journey through which their

customers choose, acquire, and consume their products or ser-

vices. To ensure that these experiences are high in quality,

firms try to influence their service providers’ behaviors (among

both employees and channel members) through careful selec-

tion and training and by exerting power and influence to incen-

tivize desirable behavior and punish bad behavior (Lemon and

Verhoef 2016). However, these traditional tools and strategies

may be less effective in the sharing economy, in which user

experiences often entail accessing an offering that is owned by

another consumer who is renting out its excess capacity. Thus,

as noted previously, sharing platforms have only limited con-

trol over the quality of the user’s experience. Furthermore, the

actions of prior users may alter the condition or performance of

a shared resource (e.g., a Lime scooter left lying in a dark

alley). Whereas a traditional product-rental firm would clean

and repair a product between renters, platforms typically

depend on users to perform these tasks. Furthermore, the prod-

ucts and services typically accessed on platforms often display

more heterogeneity than the offerings of a traditional firm. For

example, unlike the uniform nature of rooms in a Sheraton

hotel, Airbnb rentals display a considerable degree of variance.

Collectively, these unique aspects present a considerable chal-

lenge for sharing economy firms trying to optimize the cus-

tomer experience.

Future research directions. Considering these challenges, an

important research question is, What is the nature of the cus-

tomer experience journey in the sharing economy? At present,

little attention has been paid to the nature of a user’s experience

in interacting with a sharing platform. However, research

14 Journal of Marketing 83(5)

regarding consumer interactions with self-service technologies

may provide a useful foundation (e.g., Dabholkar and Bagozzi

2002; Meuter et al. 2003). This body of research suggests that

other users within a platform have a major impact on a focal

user’s experience. For example, Hazee, Delcourt, and Van

Vaerenbergh (2017) identified four barriers to customer usage

of a sharing platform. Three of these barriers center on other

users within the system (i.e., reliability of other users, con-

tamination of the shared offering, and liability due to the

behavior of other users). Likewise, Schaefers et al. (2016)

provide evidence that user misbehavior (e.g., leaving trash

and spills in a shared automobile) harms the experience of

subsequent users. Thus, future research should document the

impact of others on future user behaviors and how these beha-

viors affect customer experience as well as customer lifetime

value. New theory is needed to identify the conditions under

which the impact of other users may be negative (e.g., con-

tamination, misbehavior) or positive (e.g., advice, social

proof) in a sharing economy setting.

In addition to altering the nature of the customer journey,

customer relationships also take on a slightly different meaning

in the sharing economy. In a traditional market context, a cus-

tomer may develop a strong personal relationship with a spe-

cific service provider such as a waiter, barber, or dentist.

However, the matching algorithms and the sheer number of

participants on both sides of a sharing platform make it unlikely

that a user would have enough repeated interactions with one

provider to establish a close interpersonal relationship. Thus,

an interesting research question is, How do user interactions

with a specific resource provider affect customer experience

with a sharing platform? To date, sharing economy research

has focused more on relationships among users of a platform

(Eckhardt and Bardhi 2016; Habibi, Kim, and Laroche 2016)

than on user relationships with a platform (e.g., Yang et al.

2017). Hence, we know little about the relationships that users

form with resource providers. Yang et al. (2017) suggests that

users may form relationships with individual providers. How-

ever, this type of relationship is likely the exception rather than

the norm. Thus, we suspect that when evaluating their customer

experience, consumers are more likely to reflect on experiences

from repeated transactions across multiple platform providers,

combined with reputation-market information, to form a gen-

eralized evaluation of a platform as a whole (Perren and Kozi-

nets 2018).

As a result, the impact of an encounter with a particular

provider may play a weaker role for sharing platforms com-

pared with traditional firms. If this is indeed the case, users may

not view resource providers as “employees” of the platform and

may be less likely to hold the platform accountable for encoun-

ters (good or bad) with these providers. Thus, exploratory

research is needed to develop theory about how users view the

nature and roles of resource providers relative to the platform

on which they are sourced. Some insights can be drawn from

extant research that recognizes that differing relational levels

often coexist (e.g., Palmatier, Scheer, and Steenkamp 2007).

This prior research can serve as a launching pad to explore the

existence and relative strengths of a given user’s relationships

with a platform and with a particular provider. Furthermore,

future research could offer insights into how users, along their

consumption journey, integrate appraisals of interactions with

both the platform and with individual providers (e.g., Kranz-

hler, Kleijnen, and Verlegh 2019). Considering the rich feed-

back systems employed by many platforms, researchers may

find dynamic tools (such as textual and visual analysis) to be

particularly useful in uncovering the attributes or cues that

consumers use to evaluate providers and platforms. For exam-

ple, beyond providing insights into user decision making,

machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques may

also be useful in helping sharing platforms identify problems

in their matching mechanisms to optimize customer experi-

ences (Huang and Luo 2016).

Managing the Appropriation of Value

Key changes in the sharing economy. A critical task for any firm is

to “appropriate value ...from the marketplace” (Mizik and

Jacobson 2003, p. 63). In the traditional economy, this value

appropriation process involves competing with other firms for

customer time, energy, and money (Day and Wensley 1988). In

the sharing economy, the appropriation of value is even more

challenging, as most sharing platforms must compete not only

against other sharing platforms but also with traditional firms.

Marketing has long recognized that competition for customers

among traditional firms is not restricted to direct competitors

but also involves category-level alternatives, cross-category

substitutes, and nonconsumption (Kotler and Singh 1981).

However, before the emergence of sharing platforms, market-

ing scholarship largely centered on direct firm-to-firm com-

petition (Vorhies and Morgan 2005). Moreover, marketing

has traditionally viewed competition through the lens of war-

fare, in which firms battle for consumers (Rindfleisch 1996).

However, within the sharing economy, consumers (through

their prosumer role) may become a firm’s opponent and

appropriate value by allowing other consumers to access their

resources. As a result, sharing platforms also face the possi-

bility of competing against their prosumer providers. Thus,

the task of value appropriation appears to be particularly chal-

lenging in the sharing economy and presents several intri-

guing future research opportunities.

Future research directions. As noted previously, sharing plat-

forms must compete against both traditional firms as well as

rival platforms. Thus, an important research question is, How

can sharing platforms best appropriate value? In contrast to

traditional firms, sharing platforms appear to exhibit a stronger

degree of network effects, as the value of a platform rises with

its number of offerings and/or users (Binken and Stremersch

2009). In addition, the offerings across various sharing plat-

forms often exhibit little differentiation. For example, the

scooter-sharing platforms Bird and Lime employ offerings that

are nearly identical in look, function, and location. As a result,

many sharing markets exhibit a winner-take-all dynamic in

Eckhardt et al. 15

which a small number of providers appropriates much of the

value (Wallenstein and Shelat 2017a). Thus, our current

assumptions about competitive dynamics and value appro-

priation may be less applicable to the sharing economy. For

example, in the sharing economy, competitive success may

have more to do with market-level factors such as establishing

a first-mover advantage (Kerin and Varadarajan 1992) and

less to do with firm-level factors such as learning how to

satisfy customer needs (Dickson 1992). Consequently, the

sharing economy provides an opportunity for marketing scho-

lars to test the role of these alternative views of drivers of

value appropriation.

In assessing how sharing platforms appropriate value, mar-

keting scholars should pay particular attention to the role of

prosumers, who are the main source of value delivery. Unlike

the top-down decision making that characterizes traditional

firms, sharing platforms rely heavily on this group to make

decisions about how best to market their offerings. Clearly,

some prosumers are better marketers than others. For example,

while some prosumers can appropriate value through a rich

social network, are fluent users of technology, and possess the

emotional, cognitive, or financial resources to develop relation-

ships with their “customers,” others may be more isolated, may

be less capable of maximizing the potential of sharing plat-

forms, or need to prioritize the use of their resources in non-

prosumption aspects of their lives. Thus, the degree to which

prosumers learn best practices for the efficient use of resources

and technology from one another over time may have an impor-

tant effect on a sharing platform’s ability to appropriate value.

Empirical modelers could employ the large and growing

amount of data available on most sharing platforms to both

assess the amount of prosumer-to-prosumer learning and deter-

mine its effects on value appropriation. For example, the Tim-

bro Sharing Economy Index (Timbro 2018), compiled by

combining traffic volume data and scraped data from sharing

economy websites, emphasizes both the microtransactional

nature of the sharing economy and its ability as a matchmaker.

By analyzing the manner in which microtransactions and

matchmaking work together and spread across interpersonal

networks, scholars may be able to learn more about the way

that prosumer-to-prosumer interactions shape the value that

accrues to the firm and to prosumers in the particular sharing

system.

Another intriguing question is, How does the sharing econ-

omy affect the value appropriation of traditional firms? An

increasing array of traditional firms are facing competitive

threats from sharing platforms (Zervas, Proserpio, and Byers

2017). Moreover, a traditional firm’s customers may also be

potential competitors because they can rent out a firm’s offer-

ings through sharing platforms during periods of nonuse (Jiang

and Tian 2018). In product and service categories in which

sharing alternatives exist, evidence suggests that platforms

increase the role of price in customer choice and that traditional

firms whose offerings are most similar to platform offerings

may suffer significant losses (Zervas, Proserpio, and Byers

2017). As a result, the rise of the sharing economy appears to

present traditional firms with a set of new (and different) com-

petitors. Thus, our standard models of competition may need to

be revisited to incorporate this expanded competitive land-

scape. For example, Day and Wensley’s (1988) classic frame-

work for assessing competitive advantage recommends that

firms compare the configuration and cost of their value chains

against target competitors. Clearly, this task is considerably

easier in a traditional economy, in which competitors typically

hail from the same industry and have similar value chains. In

the sharing economy, this type of comparison not only is more

difficult but also may be potentially meaningless, as competi-

tion in the sharing economy comes in many different forms,

including rival sharing platforms, traditional firms, and prosu-

mers. Thus, research is needed to develop new techniques for

assessing competitive advantage in the sharing economy.

A related question is, How should traditional firms respond

to the rise of sharing platforms? As noted by Cramer and Krue-

ger (2016), “Uber and Lyft ...[are] providing unprecedented

competition in the taxi industry” (p. 177). Likewise, Zervas,

Proserpio, and Byers (2017) show that Airbnb reduces hotel

revenues by lowering market prices, especially among low-

priced hotels. While these studies suggest that sharing

platforms represent a considerable threat to traditional firms,

further research is needed to more fully assess the impact of

sharing platform entry and analyze the relative efficacy of

different competitive responses by traditional firms. It seems

likely that both the impact of sharing platforms and the

response by traditional firms may vary across different types

of product or service categories as well as by a firm’s standing

in an industry. Thus, a contingency perspective that accounts

for the nature of the offering and for the competitive postures of

the provider, platform, and traditional firms would help provide

nuanced insights into this question.

In response to this new threat, some incumbents try to stifle

sharing platforms through regulation and litigation, while oth-

ers seek to enter the fray by developing or acquiring their own

sharing services. For example, BMW, General Motors, and

Mercedes have all recently invested in shared automobile ser-

vices (ReachNow, Turo, and car2go, respectively). This

approach has received support from a recent study by Boston

Consulting Group, which reveals that most consumers “would

prefer to engage in sharing with professional or established

companies” (Wallenstein and Shelat 2017a, p. 4).

Moreover, some established firms in industries where shar-

ing is still new are trying to proactively establish a first-mover

advantage. For example, Mahindra has introduced sharing to

the Indian farm-equipment market by creating a platform (i.e.,

Trringo) that allows famers to rent equipment (made by its

firm) from other farmers. Established firms could also leverage

the growth of the sharing economy by developing products that

can be easily shared, because “buyers are often willing to pay a

premium for items that can generate revenue by being shared”

(Wallenstein and Shelat 2017b, p. 1). Future research is needed

to assess the effectiveness of these various competitive

approaches. As a starting point, qualitative approaches such

as case studies or ethnographic investigations may be a good

16 Journal of Marketing 83(5)

way to provide some early insights into the effectiveness of

these various response strategies.

Value Creation Outcomes

As noted previously, the AMA’s definition of marketing

views marketplace exchange as an activity that creates value

for various sets of stakeholders. In recent years, both market-

ing scholars and practitioners have placed increased emphasis

on value creation across the breadth of a firm’s stakeholders

(Kumar 2015). Thus, we examine the impact (both positive

and negative) of the sharing economy on value creation across

a diverse array of key stakeholders, including consumers,

firms, and society.

Value Creation for Consumers

Key changes in the sharing economy. One of the defining features

of sharing economy firms lies in their capacity to offer tempo-

rary access. Prior research has suggested that temporary access

may both enhance and detract consumer value. On the one

hand, access-based consumption enables an offering to be

available to segments of consumers who cannot afford owner-

ship. In addition, access provides consumers who own a shared

offering with the opportunity to earn value by monetizing its

excess capacity (Perren and Kozinets 2018). On the other hand,

the sharing economy may increase consumer risk, as users

compete with one another for the use of shared resources (Lam-

berton and Rose 2012). In addition, if sharing platforms

increase the absolute amount of time a product is used, owners

of shared offerings may face additional costs, including

increased costs for maintenance, repairs, and earlier replace-

ment due to wear-out. A simple net calculation of such costs

and benefits can yield a model that predicts the value of shar-

ing, similar to the utility model proposed by Hennig-Thurau,

Henning, and Sattler (2007) and augmented by Lamberton and

Rose (2012). While traditional utility models may provide a

good starting point, a fuller appreciation of value creation (and

erosion) in the sharing economy may require either the revision

of current models or the development of new ones.

Future research directions. Prior research has identified the driv-

ers of sharing utility, including utility from substitution, stor-

age, and anticorporate sentiment (Hennig-Thurau, Henning,

and Sattler 2007). However, as the sharing economy evolves,

the relative importance of these different factors is likely to

change and new drivers are likely to emerge. Thus, an intri-

guing research question is, What new forms of consumer utility

does the sharing economy offer, and how do they relate to

traditional drivers of value? Due to their accessible nature,

sharing economy transactions represent a form of “liquid con-

sumption” that is “ephemeral, access based, and

dematerialized” (Bardhi and Eckhardt 2017, p. 582). Ephemer-

ality refers to the notion that the nature of consumers’ relation-

ships to objects, services, and experiences, as well as the value

derived from them, is temporal in nature and particular to a

specific context (Bardhi and Eckhardt 2017, p. 585). Although

ephemerality is highly sought after in the sharing economy,

future research is needed to determine the actual value of ephe-

merality as well as how this feature is differently valued across

various consumers and contexts. In addition, little is known

about the degree to which ephemerality affects consumer value

by raising or lowering the value of repeated or extended con-

sumption experiences. For example, typical drivers of con-

sumer value (such as identity value) may be less relevant

when temporary value is sought. To answer these questions,

we recommend that scholars use the concept of ephemerality to

delineate how and why temporary value manifests itself in the

sharing economy. Ephemeral value in the sharing economy can

be compared with ephemeral experiences that have been iden-

tified in prior literature (e.g., Kozinets 2002) as well as to more

enduring sources of value (e.g., Reed, Punoti, and Warlop

2012).

Going beyond considerations of basic utility, another impor-

tant question is, What kinds of goods or services create the

most value in the sharing economy? To answer this question,

scholars should first examine the types of goods or services that

can best be shared. Benkler’s (2006) theory of social produc-

tion suggests that resources that have a high degree of

“modularity” (i.e., offerings can be independently sourced

from geographically dispersed providers and integrated into a

single platform) are most effectively shared. This may explain

why car rides are commonly shared, whereas car manufactur-

ing is not. Though persuasively argued and clearly connected to

the marketing domain, Benkler’s (2006) contention about the

role of modularity has yet to be empirically examined in our

field. This presents an opportunity for future efforts to build on

his theoretical framework. For example, marketing scholars

could determine how consumers evaluate modularity and what

type of value it provides.

A final and especially intriguing question is, What types of

value do prosumers seek in the sharing economy? Traditional

marketing thought suggests that consumers are utility maximi-

zers who aim to minimize costs and maximize financial

rewards (Bettman, Luce, and Payne 1998). However, in the

sharing economy, these financial incentives may also be sup-

plemented by social concerns and be ephemeral, as described

previously. Although prior research suggests that economic

motivations tend to dominate (Bardhi and Eckhardt 2012; Lam-

berton and Rose 2012), a recent study by Chung et al. (2019)

finds that prosumers highly value the opportunity to engage in

the act of sharing and value connecting with others. Moreover,

these social motivations appear to also provide value to firms,

as they lead to higher levels of engagement and lower levels of

churn (Chung et al. 2019). Although these recent findings are

intriguing, future research is needed to assess the role of social

versus economic motivations among sharing economy partici-

pants in particular in light of the ephemeral value that consu-

mers are seeking in this domain (Eckhardt and Bardhi 2016).

This type of inquiry seems to be quite amenable to both lab-

based experiments and field studies.

Eckhardt et al. 17

Value Creation for Firms

Key changes in the sharing economy. As noted previously, the

sharing economy creates value for consumers who otherwise

would not be able to access products or services sold by tradi-

tional firms, as well as for consumers who own underutilized

resources. However, the degree to which the sharing economy

creates value for firms is more of an open question. Clearly,

sharing platforms benefit from the rise of the sharing economy

because they play a central role in matching or connecting a large

number of providers and users who engage in mutually beneficial

exchange. Indeed, these platforms often enjoy margins that allow

them to reap a good portion of the value created in these

exchanges. Despite these high margins, most sharing platforms

struggle to generate profits. Thus, many questions remain about

how they can bestcreate and capture value in the sharing economy

to achieve long-term financial sustainability.For example, Uber’s

weakinitialpublicofferingsuggeststhatinvestorsmaybeskep-

tical about the financial sustainability of sharing platforms (Chau-

han 2019). Likewise, traditional firms that provide resources must

also adapt to the sharing economy. On the one hand, sharing a

resource across consumers implies that fewer resources may be

needed to meet aggregate demand, which may intensify compe-

tition among traditional manufacturers. On the other hand,

increased utilization of a shared resource can enhance the value

of product ownership by encouraging more consumers to acquire

these resources (Jiang and Tian 2018). Thus, the multifaceted

effects of the sharing economy can both pose threats and offer

opportunities to traditional firms.

Future research directions. One important question for scholars

interested in understanding how the sharing economy creates

value for firms is, How should sharing platforms best connect

consumers with providers (including prosumers) in terms of

matching and pricing mechanisms? This question is espe-

cially important for sharing platforms that offer services

(e.g.,ridesharingonLyft,peerhelpingonTaskRabbit).In

contrast to services offered by traditional firms, shared ser-

vices often exhibit large variations in quality and consistency.

Thus, these services will likely need to employ a dynamic

pricing approach that reflects these differences. Ride-

sharing platforms, for example, can become overburdened

during heavy traffic hours and send drivers on a “wild goose

chase” to pick up far-away customers, increasing drivers’

costs and customers’ waiting time. This potentially market-

crippling problem may be alleviated by the adoption of surge

pricing, which raises prices in the face of short supply (e.g.,

Castillo, Knoepfle, and Weyl 2018). As recently shown by

Guda and Subramanian (2019), surge pricing is useful in areas

in which supply exceeds demand to manage driver availability

across different market locations. However, many questions

remain regarding the basis of surge pricing (e.g., locations,

priority queues, ratings).

Research is also needed to understand how surge pricing

strategies are affected by competition from other sharing plat-

forms and/or traditional service providers. For example, would

the adoption of surge pricing by one ride-sharing platform

increase or decrease a competing platform’s incentive for adop-

tion of this pricing strategy, and under what circumstances?

Moreover, the design and impact of sharing platform price

structures need to be examined both conceptually and empiri-

cally. Specifically, the relative efficacy of centralized pricing

of peer-to-peer offerings (i.e., the platform sets prices) versus

decentralized pricing (i.e., individual providers set prices)

remains an open question. These two pricing structures may

have a different impact on sales and profits. Fortunately, shar-

ing platforms are replete with a rich array of digitized transac-

tional data that marketing scholars could potentially use to

assess the performance of different pricing strategies across

various market conditions and customer segments. Alterna-

tively, scholars interested in these issues could try to enlist the

cooperation of sharing platforms to conduct field experiments

to help identify optimal pricing strategies.

A second research question is, How does the sharing econ-

omy impact a traditional firm’s product line and pricing stra-

tegies? As recently shown by Jiang and Tian (2018), the

sharing economy can have both a market-expansion effect

(by inducing more consumers to purchase a sharable product)

and a cannibalization effect (some customers will seek shared

access instead of purchase). Recent analytical models have

shown that the interaction of these effects can significantly

influence a traditional firm’s optimal product design and pric-

ing decisions in a sharing economy setting (Jiang and Tian

2018). However, little is known about how an industry’s com-

petitive dynamics may alter these results. Recent research sug-

gests that some industry characteristics may have an important

effect. For example, Wan et al. (2019) and Zervas, Proserpio,

and Byers (2017) suggest that sharing platforms have a larger

impact on traditional firms that market lower-priced offerings

as opposed to those that market higher-priced offerings. How-

ever, additional work is needed to explain the impact of a wider

range of factors. For example, how might the sharing econo-

my’s impact on product line and pricing decisions vary across

different industries (e.g., real estate, cars, tools, apparel, acces-

sories) or various market conditions (e.g., more or less compe-

tition, better or worse reputation systems, more or fewer

regulations)? Furthermore, does the fact that prosumers pur-

chase products for both personal use and to rent out to others

have implications for a firm’s product line or pricing decisions?

These type of questions could be addressed conceptually, ana-

lytically, or empirically.

Value Creation for Society

Key changes in the sharing economy. In theory, the sharing econ-

omy democratizes marketplaces, expands opportunities for

small businesses and individuals, and enables access to

resources. For example, food-sharing co-ops can reduce food

insecurity and provide culinary training for individuals

attempting to enter the workforce (Johnson 2016). In addition,

sharing economy rhetoric often implies that engaging in access

rather than ownership enhances ecological well-being by

18 Journal of Marketing 83(5)

reducing overall consumption because underutilized resources

are more fully employed. If fewer products are needed, then

fewer natural resources are required for production and distri-

bution (Prothero et al. 2011). Fewer products sold results in

fewer products ending up in landfills (Botsman and Rogers

2011). Despite these hopeful contentions, the question of the

value of the sharing economy to society is far from closed.

Thus, marketing scholars have an opportunity to assess the

veracity of these proposed societal benefits and whether the

sharing economy may help address other societal ills.

Future research directions. The prospect of the sharing econo-

my’s value for society presents several research questions. Per-

haps the most important question is, Does the sharing economy

enhance societal well-being? The emergence of the sharing

economy has fostered considerable optimism (Aknin et al.

2019). However, as the sharing economy has grown, well-

being has not. In fact, according to the 2019 World Happiness

Report, U.S. citizens appear to have hit a happiness nadir. Thus,

the relationship between sharing economy participation and

happiness is an intriguing issue. Furthermore, recent research

suggests that materialism may increase the likelihood of parti-

cipating in sharing systems (Davidson, Habibi, and Laroche

2019). This finding stands in apparent contrast to prior materi-

alism scholarship, which suggests that materialistic individuals

have a strong desire to own goods (e.g., Richins and Dawson

1992; Rindfleisch, Burroughs, and Wong 2009). Because mate-

rialism has been widely linked to lower levels of psychological

well-being as well as reduced concern for the well-being of

others (Richins and Dawson 1992), the connection between

materialism and preference for access versus ownership has

important implications for societal welfare. Fortunately, this

question can be readily assessed through both survey and

experimental research techniques. For example, it would be

interesting to assess the degree to which prior findings that

employ the Richins and Dawson (1992) material values scale

replicate when applied to a sharing economy context.

In addition to well-being, another important measure of

societal welfare is equality. Thus, scholars interested in this

topic should ask, Can sharing economy transactions reduce

inequality? Users of sharing economy services are typically

highly educated affluent young people living in urban areas

(Pinar, Mohlmann, and Krishnamoorthy 2017). On the one

hand, sharing may provide value to society by facilitating

wealth transfer between individuals of high socioeconomic

status (i.e., users) and individuals of lower socioeconomic

status (i.e., providers) in need of financial resources. How-

ever, the individuals who provide sharing services are often

not classified as employees and generally lack traditional

employee benefits (Semuels 2018). Furthermore, as the shar-

ing economy grows, providers experience greater price and

volume competition between platforms, which threatens to

reduce wages (Calvey 2016). These trade-offs raise important

questions about the positive and negative effects of sharing

economy participation across socioeconomic strata and how

sharing systems can reduce, rather than reinforce, income

inequality. Longitudinal archival data that examines income

levels across time in relation to the volume of shared products

and services within a metro area could lend valuable insights

into these questions.

Another increasingly important metric of societal health is

the condition of our natural environment: Does the sharing

economy enhance environmental sustainability? In contrast to

the widely held assumption that the sharing economy reduces

net consumption of scare resources. Frenken and Schor (2017)

recently assert that the “alleged sustainability benefits of the

sharing economy are ...much more complex than initially

assumed” (p. 6). Likewise, Schor (2016), argues that compre-

hensive studies of the sustainability impact of the sharing econ-

omy are “long overdue” (p. 14). As noted by Hellwig et al.

(2015), it seems likely that consumers who participate in the

sharing economy already engage in a variety of sustainable

consumer practices. Thus, if access-based consumption merely

replaces consumption that is already sustainable (e.g., if car-

sharing users simply replace their usage of public transporta-

tion, as reported by Sisson [2018]), the net incremental

environmental benefit of sharing may be quite limited. Moreover,

as recently noted by Perren and Kozinets (2018), some sharing

systems (e.g., “matchmakers” such as TaskRabbit) may reduce

our carbon footprint, while others (e.g., “hubs,” such as Zipcar or

Grubhub) may increase it. Similarly, Schor (2016) reports that

Airbnb may ultimately result in an increased carbon footprint

because this platform enables travelers to take more trips.

Despite these various assertions, the empirical evidence

gathered thus far reveals a set of mixed findings. For example,

Martin and Shaheen (2011) find that car sharing has both a

positive and negative environmental impact. Likewise, Le Vine

et al. (2014) show that round-trip car sharing complements

public transportation usage, but that point-to-point car sharing

(which is far more common) is a substitute for public transpor-

tation. It is also unclear whether most consumers care about the

societal benefits of sharing. Indeed, prior research suggests that

even among prosustainability consumers, the ecological bene-

fits of sharing are mostly seen as “an added bonus,” and take a

back seat to price and convenience (Philip, Ozanne, and Bal-

lantine 2015, p. 1324).

To shed further light on the connection between the sharing

economy and sustainability marketing strategy scholars could

create a new metric that calculates a platform’s return on shar-

ing. We envision return on sharing as a metric that identifies the

sustainable outcomes of sharing economy systems such as the

carbon emissions that result from sharing transactions. For

example, clothes sharing platforms such as Rent the Runway

reduce carbon emissions from clothing manufacturing but

increase emissions by shipping individual clothing items to

multiple users over time. Moreover, international marketing

scholars could also contribute to this debate by examining

whether there are specific types of societies in which the sus-

tainability benefits of sharing outweighs its negative impact.

Arvidsson (2018, p. 293) suggests that shared resources only

avoid “economic tragedy” when they are embedded in a tightly

woven community of “collective stewardship,” a condition that

Eckhardt et al. 19

most access-based “communities” rarely possess (Bardhi and

Eckhardt 2012). Thus, researchers could help identify the char-

acteristics of access-based communities and the conditions

under which they exhibit this type of collective stewardship.

Guideposts for Marketing Scholarship in the

Sharing Economy

The sharing economy has exploded and is altering the way we

travel, where we stay, and what we wear (Madrigal 2019). As we

have illustrated, this new development is an emerging phenom-

enon with important implications for marketing thought. In brief,

we propose that the sharing economy challenges traditional

views regarding the nature and role of marketing institutions,

processes, and value creation and presents several important

research questions for marketing scholars. In this final section,

we aim to provide a broader view of this emerging economy by

closing with a set of three forward-looking guideposts for future

marketing scholarship in this domain. We hope that these guide-

posts help marketing scholars not only keep pace with the shar-

ing economy but also shape its future direction.

1. Investigate the paradoxes and dark side of the sharing

economy.

Thus far, our depiction of the sharing economy has been

largely positive, as we view this emerging form of exchange

as having substantial promise for enhancing the welfare of

consumers, firms, and society. However, as noted by Belk,

Eckhardt, and Bardhi (2019), the sharing economy is truly a

paradox. The word “sharing” suggests a prosocial activity

(Belk 2010), in which people and organizations engage in con-

vivial action to enhance community and conserve resources

(Botsman and Rogers 2011). However, in reality most plat-

forms largely provide a form of access (rather than sharing)

that takes place within an impersonal community of distant and

anonymous others. Thus, some commentators consider the

sharing economy “neoliberalism on steroids” and accuse shar-

ing economy systems of amplifying “the worst excesses of the

dominant economic model” (Murillo, Buckland, and Val 2017,

p. 66). Indeed, Madrigal (2019) suggests that “venture capital-

ists have subsidized the creation of platforms for low-paying

work that deliver on-demand servant services to rich people,

while subjecting all parties to increased surveillance.” For

example, Uber condones filming passengers and provides no

information about how the footage will be used (Salter 2018).

Although some sharing economy participants may see the ben-

efits of this type of surveillance (Bardhi and Eckhardt 2012),

others may be quite concerned about its potential dark side. In

addition to these privacy-related concerns, some sharing econ-

omy platforms such as Grubhub offer meager financial benefits

to their deliverers, most of whom make less than minimum

wage. Thus, it is not surprising that Uber drivers recently

mounted a strike to demand “livable incomes” (Kelleher

2019). As a result of these concerns, new sharing platforms

that are employee owned and pay a higher wage (e.g., Up &

Go) are emerging (Thompson 2019). We encourage marketing

scholars to embrace this paradox and develop frameworks that

account for not only the possible benefits of the sharing econ-

omy but also its potential drawbacks. This dark side of the

sharing economy is somewhat akin to the economic concept

of externalities. Thus, we encourage scholars who are intrigued

by this issue to review Callon’s (1998) essay on this topic,

which he approaches from both a sociological and economic

perspective.

The dark side of the sharing economy has already gained

considerable attention from a small collection of economists

and sociologists. Thus, marketing scholars interested in this

issue have a foundation on which they can build. Botsman

(2017b) contends that one positive aspect of the sharing econ-

omy is the emergence of a decentralized form of trust that flows

through sharing networks in the form of ratings systems. In

contrast, Gandini (2019) suggests that platform ratings may not

be the best way to engender trust in a decentralized sharing

economy. In addition, Schor and colleagues argue that as shar-

ing economy platforms scale, they often lose their unique iden-

tity and experience a decline in prosocial characteristics as well

as a rise in inequalities (Frenken and Schor 2017; Schor et al.

2016). For example, Couchsurfing began as a means of foster-

ing interpersonal connections among global citizens (Rosen,

Lafontaine, and Hendrickson 2011) but lost much of this

community-building focus when it transitioned to a for-profit

platform in 2013 (Mikołajewska-Zaj˛ac 2016). Marketing scho-

lars can contribute to this debate about the promise and perils of

the sharing economy by adding unique perspectives of both the

firms and consumers that participate in this emerging system.

Given the widespread importance of this issue, we encourage

our colleagues to share those insights not just in articles in

marketing journals but also in books and in top journals in other

fields (e.g., Goldfarb and Tucker 2019).

2. Examine the maturation of the sharing economy.

There appear to be two broad (and divergent) perspectives

on the sharing economy’s future. Detractors suggest that the

sharing economy is dead (Kessler 2015; Lee 2017), whereas

proponents argue that it has just begun (Del Valle 2018;

Kathan, Matzler, and Veider 2016). We believe that the latter

view is more likely to be accurate. As a point of reference, the

smartphone, which fueled the rise of the sharing economy, was

introduced in 2007, Airbnb was founded in 2008, and Uber

launched in 2009. According to a recent Pew Research survey

(May 2016), only 15% of Americans have used Uber and 11%

have tried Airbnb. Thus, as noted by Kathan, Matzler, and

Veider (2016), the sharing economy “is still in its infancy”

(p. 664). Beyond its youth, the sharing economy is dominated

by start-up enterprises located in high-tech hotbeds around the

globe, where the founders do not necessarily have experience

in the industry that they are trying to disrupt. Finally, with a few

notable exceptions (e.g., Airbnb), most sharing platforms are

sustained by an infusion of venture capital and have yet to turn

a profit. The economics for scooter-sharing firms Bird and

20 Journal of Marketing 83(5)

Lime are quite tenuous (Ridester 2018), and Uber lost $4.5

billion in 2017 (Ovide 2018). Thus, the sharing economy still

appears to be in its infancy.

The start of the sharing economy’s second decade provides

researchers with an opportunity to study its maturation process. If

the maturation of the sharing economy follows the pattern seen in

the traditional economy, a large portion of its early start-ups are

likely to fail as it enters a shake-out stage. For example, most tool-

sharing platforms have failed, and the survivors (e.g., Neighbor-

Goods) have small numbers of active users (Kessler 2015). In

contrast, several platforms for sharing yachts have recently

emerged (e.g., Boatbound, Boatsetter). Likewise, peer-to-peer

lending platforms (e.g., Prosper, LendingClub) are gaining trac-

tion, and sharing platforms are expanding in business-to-business

contexts in industries such as workspaces (e.g., Vrumi, WeWork)

and machinery (e.g., Trringo, Yard Club). Thus, marketing scho-

lars could make a valuable contribution by developing descriptive

and predictive frameworks for mapping the types of goods and

services that are optimally sharable as this economy matures. It

would be particularly helpful to identify patterns and creating

typologies of the types of resources that have been successfully

shared, failed at sharing, and have still yet to be shared.

As the sharing economy matures, many platforms appear to

be outgrowing their providers. As a result, offerings are

increasingly likely to be owned by the platform itself. For

example, Uber has invested in a fleet of cars that it leases to

drivers, and Airbnb is building a series of homes specifically

designed for sharing (Del Valle 2018). Likewise, banks, rather

than individuals, now broker most loans arranged through peer-

to-peer lending platforms (Lee 2017). Thus, as sharing plat-

forms mature, they appear to be becoming more like traditional

firms. Future research is needed to track this evolution and

identify if and when sharing platforms will evolve into more

traditional enterprises or new hybrid entities.

3. Be on the lookout for new technologies.

As noted by Wallenstein and Shelat (2017c), “The sharing

economy is still relatively young and undeveloped ...and the

technological possibilities ...are still maturing” (p. 4, empha-

sis added). Thus, scholars should keep a close eye on technol-

ogy developments to understand their potential impact. For

example, research can contribute to the debate over whether

Blockchain technologies will boost sharing platforms by pro-

viding an efficient mechanism for recording and verifying

peer-to-peer transactions (Pazaitis, De Felippi, and Kostaks

2017) or render them obsolete because Blockchain operates

without the need for a central authority (Hawlitschek, Nothei-

sen, and Teibner 2018).

As another example, ride-sharing services such as Lyft will

likely be challenged by the advent of autonomous vehicles in

the near future. For example, Tesla recently announced that it

has tallied over one billion miles of autonomous operation and

that it is working on a “Tesla Network” in which Tesla owners

will be able to share their vehicles as part of a “self-driving ride

hailing service” (Lambert 2018). According to chief executive

officer Elon Musk, “We absolutely see the future as a kind of

shared electric autonomy. ...Any customer will be able to

share their car at will, just as you share your house on Airbnb”

(Lambert 2018). As noted by Fagnant and Kockelman (2018),

shared autonomous vehicles “represent an emerging transpor-

tation mode” (p. 143) that will likely provide faster service at a

lower cost than existing ride-sharing platforms. In essence, the

future of the sharing economy may look very different as new

technologies alter the competitive landscape. Thus, it is critical

that scholars keep a sharp focus on new technological devel-

opments and their effect on the sharing economy.

If the development of the sharing economy is similar to the

path of the information economy, the impact of technology is

likely to be heavily influenced (in ways that are both positive

and negative) by government intervention. For example, in the

United States, the federal government played an important role

in fostering the development of the internet by funding early-

stage research in computer-to-computer communication

(Rogers and Kingsley 2004). In terms of the sharing economy,

the rise of promising new technologies such as autonomous

driving are likely to be closely regulated even before they are

launched (U.S. Department of Transportation 2018). Relatedly,

the Chinese government recently implemented a social credit

score, in which an individual’s rating across multiple platforms

contributes to an overall score of trustworthiness, which affects

one’s ability to travel, gain access to credit, and even get a date

(Botsman 2017a). This new technology-based form of govern-

mental monitoring will also likely affect the degree to which

Chinese consumers can participate in the sharing economy as

either providers or users. This intersection of technology and

government will likely increase in the years ahead and presents

intriguing new interdisciplinary research opportunities for

scholars across both marketing strategy and public policy.

Conclusion

As our definition, explication, and examples show, the sharing

economy presents an opportunity to ask new questions and

develop new frameworks. To address these challenges, market-

ing scholars will likely need to embrace fresh perspectives,

employ new data sources and methods, and look beyond their

insular silos. This opportunity is particularly intriguing because

the sharing economy is relevant to all facets of the marketing

domain, including consumer behavior (e.g., Lamberton and

Rose 2012), consumer culture (e.g., Eckhardt and Bardhi

2016), analytic modeling (e.g., Jiang and Tian 2018), empirical

modeling (Zervas, Proserpio, and Byers 2017), and strategy

(e.g., Kumar, Lahiri, and Dogan 2018). Thus, the important

breakthroughs in this domain are likely to emerge from an

intersection of scholars with different sets of skills, different

types of data, and expertise in different theoretical domains.

Indeed, this is the case for our author team, which, despite our

diversity in terms of perspectives and methods, is united in a

common belief in the revolutionary potential of the sharing

economy. We hope that our thoughts about marketing in the

sharing economy shed new light on this emerging system and

Eckhardt et al. 21

stimulate a broad range of scholars to reexamine traditional

beliefs and reinvigorate marketing thought.

Appendix: Future Research Agenda by

Topical Domain

Future Research Directions for Institutions

Consumers



What types of judgements, heuristics, and biases affect the

consumption of shared (as opposed to owned) resources?



What drives customer satisfaction in the sharing economy?



How does consumer identity affect the sharing economy

experience?

Firms and Channels



How can sharing platforms ensure quality?



How does the sharing economy alter our understanding of

marketplace institutions at a collective level?

Regulatory Entities



What is the role of existing regulations and policies in gov-

erning sharing economy activities?



What is the role of trust in the sharing economy and to what

degree can it regulate sharing economy transactions?



How should regulatory entities balance the costs and bene-

fits of implementing sharing economy regulation?



Who should regulate the sharing economy?

Future Research Directions for Marketing Processes

Managing Innovation



What is the role of product innovation in the sharing

economy?



What is the relative role of radical versus incremental inno-

vation in the sharing economy?



What are the drivers of innovation in the sharing economy?

Managing Brands



Do communities form around sharing platform brands?



What are the prospects of luxury branding in the sharing

economy?



What types of value do sharing platform brands provide to

users?

Managing the Customer Experience



What is the nature of the customer experience journey in the

sharing economy?



How do user interactions with a specific resource provider

affect customer experience with a sharing platform?

Managing the Appropriation of Value



How can sharing platforms best appropriate value?



How does the sharing economy affect the value appropria-

tion of traditional firms?



How should traditional firms respond to the rise of sharing

platforms?

Future Research Directions for Value Creation

Value for Consumers



What new forms of utility does the sharing economy offer,

and how do they relate to prior drivers of value?



What kinds of goods or services create the most value in the

sharing economy?



What types of value do prosumers seek in the sharing

economy?

Value for Firms



How should sharing platforms best connect consumers with

providers (including prosumers) in terms of matching and

pricing mechanisms?



How does the sharing economy influence a traditional firm’s

product line and pricing decisions?

Value for Society



Does sharing economy enhance societal well-being?



Can sharing economy transactions reduce inequality?



Does the sharing economy enhance environmental

sustainability?

Editors

Christine Moorman and Harald van Heerde

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to

the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, author-

ship, and/or publication of this article.

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