Understanding the Sharing Economy -- Drivers and Impediments for Participation in Peer-to-Peer Rental

As peer-to-peer coordinated products and services increasingly constitute competition for traditional businesses in many areas, understanding the underlying user motives of provision and consumption is key -- not only for business operators, but also for researchers investigating such markets. In this article, we develop a questionnaire for assessing motives for and against participating in what is casually referred to as the "Sharing Economy." More specifically, we focus on peer-to-peer rental services and investigate drivers and impediments for user activity in such markets by means of an online survey with over 600 participants.

1. Introduction

Today's e-commerce landscape experiences the development of new forms of markets. Whereas the last decade was mainly characterized by B2C e-commerce [18], we now encounter the rapid growth ¹

exceeding 25% p.a., http://goo.gl/MGcegm

of consumer-to-consumer (C2C) market platforms. On such platforms, private persons come together to share goods as well as services in large scale “peer-to-peer” networks that often promise a more social, sustainable, varied, convenient, anti-capitalistic, or inexpensive alternative to usual means of consumption [5], [29], [31], whereas the set of possible motives goes on. The attention of researchers all over the world has shifted to this phenomenon, often blurrily referred to as the “Sharing Economy.”