The Rise in the Sharing Economy: Indian Perspective

Defining The Sharing Economy

Sharing economy has been often referred and used interchangeably by several authors as collaborative consumption (Botsman and Rogers, 2010), peer to peer economy (Henning-Tharu et al., 2007) access-based consumption (Bardhi and Eckhardt, 2012), commercial sharing systems (Lamberton and Rose, 2012), connection consumption (Schor, 2015) and Mesh (Ganskey, 2010) among others.

The term ‘collaborative consumption’ was popularized by Botsman and Rogers in their pioneering work What’s Mine is Yours (2010). According to their definition, collaborative consumption occurs when people participate in organized sharing, bartering, trading, renting and swapping to get the same pleasures of ownership with reduced personal cost and lower environmental impact. Bardhi and Eckhard (2012) defined sharing as ‘access-based consumption’ where the transaction in the market takes place without transferring the ownership. Meelen and Frenken (2015) also define sharing economy as granting temporary access to customers to use ones under- utilized assets in return for money.