All things considered

The sharing economy has a promising future, but present-day issues must be addressed in order for it to thrive sustainably.

- PIA A ALBINSSON AND B YASANTHI PERERA, AUTHORS, THE RISE OF THE SHARING ECONOMY

No matter where you live in the world, you or someone you know has likely participated in the sharing economy as either a provider or a user by sharing rides, homes, or workspaces, or by participating in community initiatives such as Gujarat’s ‘give and take’ or Peru’s ‘chain of favors’, a payit-forward system. While such community initiatives are a part of the sharing economy, the dominant business model is that of peer independent contractors providing services to consumers. However, the notion of sharing itself is nothing new. After all, from an early age, we learn that sharing is a virtue, or that ‘sharing is caring’, or that we had to share out of necessity due to resource scarcity. Irrespective of its underpinnings, many of us grew up accustomed to sharing possessions with family, friends, neighbours, and other community members. The modern-day sharing economy has taken sharing to another level. By connecting those with idle resources to those seeking access to such goods, new digital platforms have significantly impacted consumption and employment patterns while expanding circles of sharing to include strangers. In many cases, these platforms have monetised sharing to the point that these transactions are akin to product-service systems, thereby bringing an ethos of ‘pseudo-sharing’, which Russell Belk in his The Anthropologist article ‘Sharing versus pseudo-sharing in Web 2.0’ characterises as ‘commodity exchanges wrapped in the vocabulary of sharing’.