Abstract
Airbnb and Uber enable private individuals to share physical resources via their Internet platforms, and both have become popular subjects of information systems and e-business research. In the top dogs’ slipstream resides a variety of less-known platforms that allow to share different resources or to share resources in different ways. Researchers who study these platforms and the underlying consumer behaviors face the problem of situating their findings precisely. Practitioners lack an overview of the diversity of these platforms and their characteristics too. This article suggests a taxonomy that helps to better characterize platforms for Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Sharing and Collaborative Consumption (SCC). We used the taxonomy to describe the evolution of 522 P2P SCC platforms over the period of 35 months and to demonstrate and partly evaluate its application. All descriptions taken together constitute a comprehensive data source to study P2P SCC platforms. When researchers use the taxonomy, they can describe and situate insights precisely so that stakeholders can access them more easily. Furthermore, researchers and practitioners can use our database as well as the analyses we made based on the data for their purpose. Because we deliver the computer scripts that we used in our analysis, our study can easily be reproduced in the future to investigate the dynamics of the P2P SCC market.
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Notes
The “Appendix 3” provides references to all mentioned platform examples.
http://www.collaborativeconsumption.com/, Collaborative Consumption (last extraction on 29th of January 2017).
http://www.compareandshare.com/, Compare and Share Website (last extraction on 29th of January 2017).
http://meshing.it/, Mesh Website (last extraction on 29th of January 2017).
Cf. anonymized Git repository under https://github.com/P2PSCC/ShareEco for a more detailed description of the scripts.
http://www.thepeoplewhoshare.com/, the people who share Website (last extraction on 29th of January 2017).
See (Nickerson et al. 2013, p. 344) for a list of suggested ending conditions.
Cf. anonymized Git repository under https://github.com/P2PSCC/ShareEco.
We searched for pro-social (social*, neighbor*, help, responsib*, community, share, experience,..., as well as adjectives related to the consumer experience such as fun and joy), environment-related (environment*, green, sustainab*, responsib*, pollution, carbon, reduce,...) and economical (monetiz*, profit*, money, earn*, business, cost,...) keywords in the texts included on the home, about, FAQ and howto sections of the platform websites.
BlaBlaCar, https://www.blablacar.com/, last accessed on 23th of October 2015.
Alexa, http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/, last accessed 17th of January 2017.
Whois Lookup, https://www.whois.net/, last accessed 17th of January 2017.
As explained in Sect. 4.2, we consider every unique combination of resources offered on a P2P SCC platform as an individual resource type. Sharing of cars and boats is, therefore, one characteristic for the dimension resource type that is only given to those platforms that exhibit this particular combination exclusively.
Typical examples of platforms that reflect about their decision to shut down are GearCommons (http://gearcommons.com) and Fleety (https://www.fleety.com.br).
Food, land and storage spaces are not investigated further due to insignificant numbers of total occurrences.
Divergence from the previously mentioned 522 platforms can be explained by the removal of platforms from 2016 and incomplete data regarding the launch year of all platforms.
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Appendices
Appendix 1: New versus old and ceased versus active platforms overview
Taxonomy evaluation for platforms after (before) 2014
Taxonomy evaluation for ceased (active) platforms
Appendix 2: Resource types and platform examples
Appendix 3: Subset of platforms that were discussed as examples
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Chasin, F., von Hoffen, M., Cramer, M. et al. Peer-to-peer sharing and collaborative consumption platforms: a taxonomy and a reproducible analysis. Inf Syst E-Bus Manage 16, 293–325 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10257-017-0357-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10257-017-0357-8