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This article addresses the lack of scholarly attention paid to the sharing economy from a sociological perspective, with respect to the technology-mediated interactions between sharing economy users. The paper provides a critical overview of the sharing economy and its impact on business and communities and explores how information technology can facilitate authentic, genuine sharing through exercising and enabling conviviality and non-direct reciprocity.

The paper begins with a critique of the technology-mediated sharing economy, introduces the concept of conviviality as a tool to grow and shape community and sustainability within the sharing economy and then explores reciprocity and sharing behaviour. Finally, the paper draws upon social exchange theory to illustrate conviviality and reciprocity, using four case studies of technology-enabled sharing.

The paper contributes to the emerging debate around how the sharing economy, driven by information systems and technology, affects social cohesion and personal relationships. The paper elucidates the central role conviviality and reciprocity play in explaining the paradoxes, tensions and impact of the sharing economy on society. Conviviality and reciprocity are positioned as key capabilities of a more sustainable version of the sharing economy, enabled via information technology.

The findings reveal that information technology-mediated sharing enterprises should promote conviviality and reciprocity in order to deliver more positive environmental, economic and social benefits. The diversity of existing operations indicated by the findings and the controversies discussed will guide the critical study of the social potential of sharing economy to avoid treating all sharing alike.

The sharing economy, supported by digital platforms, efficiently matches the demand and supply of underused resources. Expanding globally and impacting different industries is offering a new path to sustainable resource consumption. The United Nations endorsed the sustainable development goals (SDGs), responding to a global call to end poverty, protect the environment and ensure that by 2030, everyone lives in peace and prosperity. Researchers have linked the sharing economy with SGDs, and extensive efforts have been exerted to quantify its impact.

Due to its evolving nature, especially in developing countries, there is a need for research to assess its promises and challenges from the SDG perspective. This research fills in this gap and contributes to the sharing economy studies by exploring its evolution within the framework of sustainable development goals, followed by an assessment of various methodologies for measuring the sharing economy and highlighting the significance of the web mining technique.

The proper implementation of this decentralized business model within a country is encouraging optimal resource use, lowering energy consumption and increasing long-term economic development. The sharing economy is a disruptive force that addresses the pillars of sustainability.

The research holds importance in addressing the achievement of the SDGs through the sharing economy, necessitating focus from policymakers and scholarly discourse on its merits. The transformative impact of the sharing economy poses questions about its encouragement or regulation, with the potential to disrupt established monopolies and possibly create new ones. Its successful implementation underscores the significance of effective data sharing and governance.

This chapter aims to present and analyse the phenomenon of ‘sharing economy’ or ‘collaborative consumption’ in relation to tourism entrepreneurship. It presents and highlights the factors contributing to the growth of sharing economy and its business models, as well as strategically analyse related opportunities, challenges, concerns and threats in the field of tourism entrepreneurship.

Literature review was conducted on conceptual issues and main aspects of sharing economy, combined with examples and case studies within the tourism business environment.

This chapter highlights the fact that tourism businesses face new developments, trends and changes in tourist consumer behaviour and travel technology. It shows that sharing economy is on the rise, already affecting all segments of tourism industry, offering significant opportunities, as well as challenges and threats.

This chapter is explorative in nature because the discussed is based on a literature review.

The sharing economy/collaborative consumption is transforming the way people access goods and services changing all elements of trip planning. This is of great significance to the tourism industry, considering the business opportunities in all segments of related businesses. It is suggested that tourism entrepreneurs – existing, new and prospective – should elaborate the suitable strategies to address the new challenges.

It analyses main issues and aspects of the sharing economy within the tourism context. This analysis contributes to an improved knowledge and understanding that are very useful to all existing and prospective tourism providers.

The paper aims to analyse the issues and challenges in implementing and adopting the sharing economy concept in tourism. More specifically, the paper intends to identify critical factors for seeking possible pathways for achieving sustainable development of the Indian tourism industry.

This research work has adopted the triangulation approach involving a twofold study concerning the perspectives of both service providers and customers. To cull deeper insight, an inductive content analysis was carried out to identify the critical factors influencing sharing economy in tourism and establish them as key research areas for further study.

The study identified seven critical influencing factors, namely, affordability, consciousness, cultural involvement, status quo biasness, socio-environmental responsiveness, regulatory supervision and technological drivers concerning sharing economy in tourism.

This study will expand the existing literature by exploring the critical factors relevant to the practice of sharing economy in the tourism industry. It will aid both marketers and policymakers to bridge the gap between what sharing economy concept demands, what consumers perceive and how service providers practise in reality. The present study limits its scope to qualitative analysis and geographical boundary within India. Further research with empirical study may be extended in future, with the research agendas presented in this paper.

The novelty of the study lies in the identification of both intrinsic and extrinsic factors affecting the implementation of sharing economy in tourism. To delve deeper into the ground reality, this qualitative study corroborates the perspectives of both the demand and supply side, which is a unique effort by itself.

Today, collaborative consumption platforms support business activities. In particular, the sharing economy (SE) increases social and economic dynamism and reduces environmental impact by conserving resources. Therefore, this paper investigates the sustainable value drivers of sharing economy practices.

We explore multiple case studies as a research approach to answer the research question. Multiple sources of evidence were used to triangulate the data. The SE practices influence several sectors; thus, we conducted a sector analysis investigating the healthcare, food and fashion industries. Analysing different sectors provides valuable theoretical and practical insights, facilitating decision-making and fostering innovation. Sectoral differences emphasize how different sustainable SE models are configured.

The findings highlight that SE allows for the development of sustainable business models attesting to: (1) value capture in the food industry, (2) value delivery in the healthcare industry and (3) value creation in the fashion industry. The study opens avenues for future research.

The originality of this study is in the new lens from which the phenomenon is observed.

This chapter explores how classic and institutional entrepreneurs in the sharing economy (SE) frame and make sense of the emergent, plural, and contested SE concept. The authors address this question through an investigation of an attempt to institutionalize the SE as a separate field in France, through data collected among SE entrepreneurs gravitating around OuiShare, a leading institutional entrepreneur for the SE. To analyze the plurality of discursive framings within the SE field, we explored how classic entrepreneurs affiliated with the SE and institutional entrepreneurs made sense of the concept and its related practices by referring to different theories and narratives. The results reveal that classic entrepreneurs used and combined four distinct theoretical currents (access economy, commons, gift, and libertarianism) to frame their projects. This framing diversity was further reinforced at the meso level by specific forms of institutional entrepreneurship which reflected and actively built on such framing diversity. However, over time, such heterogeneity negatively affects the internal coherence of the field. Based on these results, the authors discuss the impact of enduring framing diversity on the SE organizational field emergence and development.

The purpose of this paper is to examine use and sharing economy (SE) continuance intention, and the mediation effects of use between individuals' motivations and SE continuance intention. A theoretical model is developed to explain use and SE continuance intention as intrinsic and extrinsic motivated behaviour, as proposed by self-determination theory. Factors are derived from SE context and supported by published research on SE.

The partial least squares path modelling (PLS-PM) technique is used to test the model in a quantitative study involving 256 users of SE services.

Findings suggest that use and SE continuance can be explained by concurrent intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Moreover, high environmental concerns may restrain the use of SE services. Findings show that continuance intention is influenced by current use of SE services. Moreover, the study emphasizes the mediation effect of use between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and SE continuance intention.

The analysis of use behaviour should be complemented with other measures of use and with data provided by qualitative methods of research. Further research should also consider the effect of different control variables and mediation effects.

Brand managers and companies providing services through digital platforms should address individuals' needs in order to stimulate voluntary engagement in persistent SE practices.

This study informs the consumer in general so that the SE can develop its potential alongside an economy based on the ownership of private property.

This study extends findings on continuance intention research by offering internal motivation factors as predictors of post-adoption behaviour and emphasizes the role of use on SE continuance intention.

This study explores how sharing platforms achieve platform loyalty through various operation management strategies.

A multiple case study method has been conducted in two Chinese sharing economy industries: ride- and bike-sharing. Data were collected through 30 semi-structured interviews with managers from four platform companies (DiDi, Uber China, ofo and Mobike). Individual case studies were developed from the triangulation of all existing data. Concurrent with the development of these individual case studies was a cross-case analysis. Emerging patterns have been identified and compared to previous findings in the literature to build upon and modify the existing knowledge base and to formulate a series of propositions.

Platform asset characteristics and mergers and acquisitions affect supply network readiness and operational capacity, respectively, and this effect would consequently contribute to achieving platform loyalty through user satisfaction. Moreover, externality, as a moderator, may influence the strength of the relationship between satisfaction and platform loyalty.

The proposed theoretical model provides an overarching framework for sharing platform companies to design and operate their businesses while carefully examining the situations, contexts and actions of users and other stakeholders and choosing an appropriate strategic mechanism to drive platform growth.

This study is one of the first to empirically explain how firms in a sharing economy sector could gain platform loyalty by adopting an expectation–confirmation theory perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to look at the insights of the value of the society influenced by sharing economy (SE). The study focused on both the benefits and flaws of SE by using the case of renowned SE platform “Uber” to come up with a holistic perspective of these effects from both the facets.

This study collects data from demand and supply side using interview and questionnaire. Then the grounded theory is adopted to analyze interview data and come up with six major research constructs. Further, quantitative analyses methods are applied on questionnaires to test “whether sharing economy creates social value” and to approximately estimate the extent to which sharing is economy influencing social value.

Findings suggested that, when only drivers were inquired about positive and negative effects of SE, positive effects were dominant. Also, when passengers were asked their opinion was also in favor of positive effects. From quantitative data analysis, the major factor significantly influencing the sustainability of the SE was “efficiency.” “Security issues and regulatory issues” were the prime negative factors, though again there was not enough statistical evidence to validate their significance. The authors hereby conclude that the positive contribution of SE is more, and it is increasing the values of the society. And the positive effects were twice significant than the negative effects.

Theoretically, the study contributes to finding both the helpful and harmful effects of SE on the values of the society. Practically, it suggests that governments should allow growth of SE under proper regulations. And car-sharing companies should focus on solving the security issues and regulatory issues.

In this study, the authors examine how organizational-, systems- and interpersonal-level trust may be required for a smooth functioning of the firms in the sharing economy (SE). The research objective is to explore the trust-building mechanisms of Airbnb, a leading SE organization, and its aim to foster generalized trust. An investigation of the Airbnb's promotion of different trust-building mechanisms will allow to evaluate their effectiveness in how they can help overcome scepticism and distrust between the transacting parties. Consequently, the authors can develop a unique theoretical perspective on generalized trust in SE environments and better understand any trust-related barriers preventing SE transactions.

The authors employ a case study approach to investigate the research questions with the aim to fully understand the abstract and complex nature of trust. They focus on Airbnb as the company enjoys a leading market position, being a sharing economy firm. Moreover, the personal nature of accommodation sharing, which is the business of Airbnb, increases users' trust requirements, and so the company must take active steps to promote trust between the transacting parties. The authors adopt thematic analysis to execute the data analysis of the study's findings, which are derived from emergent themes and directed by the research objectives and relevant literature.

The results show that users of Airbnb are concerned about the danger of opportunistic hosts, although they are primarily motivated to use the company's services due to its economic benefits. Nevertheless, the success of Airbnb platform stems from the trust that the company has succeeded in establishing among its users, in particular interpersonal trust. Analysis reveals that generalized trust is fostered at an interpersonal level in the form of peer reviews, at an organizational level in terms of brand familiarity and at a systems level in regards to interface design.

The authors advance the argument that confidence to transact in the social economy stems from a combination of three levels of trust, including organizational-, systems- and interpersonal-level trust. These findings contribute to the body of trust research in information technology and people literature from its unique investigative setting, whilst simultaneously strengthening the primarily speculative research on SE with in-depth empirical evidence.