Abstract
In recent years, mobile communications technologies and online sharing platforms have made collaborative consumption among consumers a major trend in the economy. Consumers buy many products but end up not fully utilizing them. A product owners self-use values can differ over time, and in a period of low self-use value, the owner may rent out her product in a product-sharing market. This paper develops an analytical framework to examine the strategic and economic impact of product sharing among consumers. Our analysis shows that transaction costs in the sharing market have a non-monotonic effect on the firm’s profits, consumer surplus, and social welfare. We find that when the firm strategically chooses its retail price, consumers sharing of products with high marginal costs is win-win for the firm and the consumers whereas their sharing of products with low marginal costs can be lose-lose. Further, in the presence of the sharing market, the firm will find it optimal to strategically increase its quality, leading to higher profits but lower consumer surplus. In addition, within a distribution channel framework, the existence of the sharing market is more likely to increase the downstream retailers profit than the upstream manufacturers profit, i.e., product sharing can sometimes benefit the downstream retailer at the expense of the upstream manufacturer.
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Notes
- 1.
Though we use consumer-to-consumer sharing as the context, our model applies equally to business-to-business sharing of products, e.g., the sharing of equipment among businesses or hospitals. The essence is that a firm/manufacturer’s customers may rent out the product to its other potential customers during periods of low self-use value.
- 2.
For expositional convenience, we refer to the firm/manufacturer as “it” and a consumer as “she.”
- 3.
The firm is assumed to play no direct role in the product-sharing market. In reality, in many markets, the firms (manufacturers) themselves do not offer hour-to-hour or day-to-day rentals of their products. This may be because the firm’s transaction cost for managing renting of its products is much higher than that for consumers. For example, a consumer with an Xbox console can rent it to others in her local area on a daily or weekly basis much more efficiently than Microsoft, the producer of the Xbox, since the company would have many logistical issues (e.g., due to the lack of physical presence in the consumer’s local area or city). Indeed, in reality, on these product-sharing platforms (or the firms’ stores), we typically do not see the firms themselves offering to rent their products on a day-to-day basis; for example, we do not see General Motors offering hourly rental of their cars on car-sharing websites or at its own dealerships.
- 4.
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This chapter is extensively based on the authors’ paper in Management Science (Jiang and Tian 2018).
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Jiang, B., Tian, L. (2019). The Strategic and Economic Implications of Consumer-to-Consumer Product Sharing. In: Hu, M. (eds) Sharing Economy. Springer Series in Supply Chain Management, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01863-4_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01863-4_3
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