Abstract
Airbnb and Uber are two outstanding examples of the sharing economy, a recently observed tendency that people are willing to share their property or to rent property instead of owning it. There is a vast literature on the prospects of the sharing economy and on the economics of platforms, which enable the sharing economy. Less research is found on the reasons for this development and on the question whether these new types of transactions require new governance frameworks. In this paper we will show, what explains the individual ownership decision and how changing preferences and changing transaction costs may lead to the sharing economy. Platforms play a crucial role in lowering the transaction costs, but they come along with new dependencies because they tend to become monopolies over time. Thus, platforms may start to exploit their dominant position at the expense of platform users. We will show that the—up to now purely fictitious—idea of a platform operated as a cooperative, i.e. a platform that is owned by its users, would significantly mitigate the users’ exploitability and reduce their dependency costs. We will distinguish different types of platform cooperatives and we will classify them according to applicability in the sharing economy.
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Notes
- 1.
For this extended view see for example PwC (2016), p. 3.
- 2.
This only refers to the CPU use, for which it makes no difference whether the processor is running idle or is actually computing.
- 3.
Peitz and Schwalbe (2016), p. 233.
- 4.
Miller (2016), p. 150.
- 5.
Sundararajan (2014).
- 6.
- 7.
See for example Katz (2015), p. 1073 explicitly mentioning the peer-to-peer characteristic.
- 8.
- 9.
Horton and Zeckhauser (2016) is one of the rare papers discussing the ownership-rental decision in an economic model, but is not taking into account the criteria listed below.
- 10.
- 11.
One exception is the joint use of products like for BlaBlaCar, where the supply od the service can only be offered if the owner uses the good (in the case of BlaBlaCar the car).
- 12.
- 13.
- 14.
For a more detailed differentiation of indirect network externalities see Peitz (2006).
- 15.
Rare exemptions are smaller platforms that create additional value for their members like a certain specialization, which over-compensates the size benefits of larger platforms.
- 16.
See Monopolkommission (2016), no. 1233 on the impediments of switching platforms.
- 17.
These power law or long-tail effects have been initially described by Anderson (2006).
- 18.
In cooperatives demand or supply can be bundled. In the following we will confine ourselves to the demand side. Nevertheless, all arguments also apply to supply-side cooperatives.
- 19.
- 20.
One example is OSADL eG. OSADL is a cooperative that produces open source software solutions for companies of the machinery industry. Members of the cooperative are companies from the machinery industry (demand side) and IT companies programming the software (supply side).
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Theurl, T., Meyer, E. (2019). Cooperatives in the Age of Sharing. In: Riemer, K., Schellhammer, S., Meinert, M. (eds) Collaboration in the Digital Age. Progress in IS. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94487-6_9
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