Globally, prominent sharing-based services include Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb, which have become behemoths in terms of their valuation, revenue, and number of users. Uber is reported to have over 100 million users globally. Bangladesh has also witnessed a rise in sharing-based services of both global and local origins. Sharing services have severely disrupted traditional business models and the economy they collectively encompass is referred to as the “sharing economy.” Based on a systematic literature review of top management journals and other scholarly works, the authors present the most overarching conceptualization of sharing-based services. Taking this knowledge forward, this chapter not only conceptualizes and compares sharing-based services in Bangladesh but also identifies “collaborative consumption” as the most dominant type of sharing-based services among them. This chapter also presents scholarly works on the customers' motivators and barriers, which creates grounds for future research efforts in Bangladesh concerning collaborative consumption services.
Top1. Introduction
The advancement in information technologies has transformed the primitive nature of sharing activities restricted to friends, family, and neighbors into the software-aided exchanges among strangers. Technology-enabled sharing activities can be traced back to 1999 when Napster facilitated the sharing of digital music among peers as a form of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing (Belk, 2014). Over the years, start-up companies, with the help of their web-based platforms accessible from mobile applications, have created a bridge between the owners and interested people to ensure the shared consumption of limited resources. From pet-sitting (e.g. DogVacay) to parking-space sharing (e.g. JustPark), there are hundreds of web-based platforms (i.e. services) powering the so-called ‘’sharing economy’’ by connecting people both locally and globally. Although there are definitional disputes among the scholars, one definition of sharing economy could be- consumers granting each other temporary access to under-utilized physical assets (“idle capacity”), possibly for money (Frenken & Schor, 2017).
These services have disrupted several industries and the growth potential of the sharing economy is astonishing. According to the forecast made by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), five sectors of sharing economy will increase global revenues from $15 billion in 2015 to $335 billion in 2025 (PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, 2015). Each night, on an average 2 million people are sleeping in the beds of strangers through Airbnb- a peer-to-peer accommodation renting platform (Airbnb, Inc., 2019). However, there are also failure instances of these services across the globe. For example, two of the most valued Unicorn Companies (valued at $1 billion or more) in the US have lost significant share values recently and are not expected to be profitable in near future (Monica, 2019). Due to its inability to attract users, Stayzilla (an Indian peer-to-peer accommodation sharing platform) closed its operation in 2017 (Täuscher & Kietzmann, 2017).
Academic scholars from diverging academic disciplines have attempted to unravel various aspects of this novel phenomenon (Sutherland & Jarrahi, 2018). The earlier cohorts of academic works focused mostly on the conceptualizations of sharing economy, the conceptualizations of the associated business models, and the motivators and barriers to users’ participation in these models. In these efforts, academic works have produced fragmented results. The dizzying level of terms (e.g. sharing economy platform economy, two-sided markets, collaborative consumption, access-based consumption, etc.) produced by the scholars bears the evidence of such fragmented results (Benoit, et al., 2017; Sutherland & Jarrahi, 2018). Furthermore, most of the conceptual and empirical research does not distinguish among various sharing-based services (Davidson, et al., 2017). Although there are already hundreds of works existing in the academic sphere, there is a dearth of works that have proposed an overarching conceptualization of this novel phenomenon.