Abstract
Despite the increasing criticism of the sharing economy, how sharing as a prosocial behavior and communal act has been practiced in this context has yet to be systematically examined. This chapter aims to bridge this knowledge gap by first analyzing the extent to which sharing is reflected in the framings of the sharing economy, and then assessing how it has been practiced from three key dimensions of the sharing economy, namely access, sharing with strangers, and digital platforms. It concludes that there are a series of inherent paradoxes in the sharing economy, whereby the social benefits of sharing are always likely to be hindered by the ways in which sharing is practiced. Design is, therefore, needed to enhance sharing and accentuate many of its prosocial traits.
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Chan, J.K.H., Zhang, Y. (2020). Assessing the State of Sharing in the Sharing Economy. In: Sharing by Design. SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences and Technology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43569-1_2
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