Table 3.
Definitions of the sharing economy
| Date | Authors | Definition | Source | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1978 | Felson and Spaeth | “Acts of collaborative consumption, namely, those events in which one or more persons consume economic goods or services in the process of engaging in joint activities with one or more others” (p. 614) | American Behavioral Scientist | 153 |
| 2004 | Benkler | Refers to “sharing goods” as “a class of resources or goods that are amenable to being shared within social sharing systems rather than allocated through markets” (p. 356) | Yale Law Journal | 321 |
| 2007 | Belk | “Sharing is an alternative to the private ownership that is emphasized in both marketplace exchange and gift giving” (p. 127) | The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science | 267 |
| 2008 | Lessig | “Collaborative consumption made by the activities of sharing, exchanging, and rental of resources without owning the goods” (p. 143) | Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy | 3264* |
| 2010 | Botsman and Rogers | “An economic model based for sharing underutilized assets for monetary or non-monetary benefits” (p. xv) | What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption | 4363* |
| 2012 | Bardhi and Eckhardt | “Transactions that may be market mediated in which no transfer of ownership takes place” (p. 881) | Journal of Consumer Research | 600 |
| 2012 | Lamberton and Rose | “Marketer-managed systems that provide customers with the opportunity to enjoy product benefits without ownership. Importantly, these systems are characterized by between consumer rivalry for a limited supply of the shared product” (p. 109) | Journal of Marketing | 289 |
| 2013 | Heinrichs | “The concept (SE) involves individuals exchanging, redistributing, renting, sharing, and donating information, goods, and talent, either organizing themselves or via commercial organization by social media platforms” (p. 229) | GAIA-Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society | 220 |
| 2014 | Belk | “Collaborative consumption is people coordinating the acquisition and distribution of a resource for a fee or other compensation” (p. 1597) | Journal of Business Research | 822 |
| 2014 | Botsman | “The collaborative economy is a system that activates the untapped value of all kinds of assets through models and marketplaces that enable greater efficiency and access increasingly those assets include skills, utilities, and time” (p. 24) | Harvard Business Review | 23 |
| 2015 | Schor and Fitzmaurice | “Peer to peer sharing of access to under-utilised goods and services, which prioritizes utilization and accessibility over ownership, either for free or for a fee” (p. 410) | Handbook of Research on Sustainable Consumption | 99* |
| 2015 | Stephany | “The sharing economy is the value in taking underutilized assets and making them accessible online to a community, leading to a reduced need for ownership of those assets” (p. 9) | The Business of Sharing—Making it in the New Sharing Economy | 363* |
| 2016 | Aloni | “An economic activity in which web platforms facilitate peer-to-peer exchanges of diverse types of goods and services” (p. 1398) | Washington Law Review | 12 |
| 2016 | Barnes and Mattsson | “The use of online marketplaces and social networking technologies to facilitate peer-to-peer sharing of resources (such as space, money, goods, skills and services) between individuals, who may be both suppliers and consumers” (p. 42) | Technological. Forecasting and Social Change | 93 |
| 2016 | Cockayne | “The on-demand or “sharing” economy is a term that describes digital platforms that connect consumers to a service or commodity through the use of a mobile application or website” (p. 73) | Geoforum | 64 |
| 2016 | European Commission | “It refers to business models in which activities are facilitated through collaborative platforms that create an open market for the temporary use of goods or services often offered by individuals” (p. 3) | European Comission | n.a |
| 2016 | Hamari, Sjöklint and Ukkonen | “The sharing economy as an umbrella concept that encompasses several ICT developments and technologies, among others Collaborative Consumption, which endorses sharing the consumption of goods and services through online platforms” (p. 2047) | Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology | 729 |
| 2016 | Kathan, Matzler and Veider | “This so-called sharing economy phenomenon is characterized by non-ownership, temporary access, and redistribution of material goods or less tangible assets such as money, space, or time” (p. 663) | Business Horizons | 87 |
| 2016 | Puschmann and Alt | “The use of an object (a physical good or service) whose consumption is split-up into single parts. These parts are collaborative consumed in C2C networks coordinated through community-based online services or through intermediaries in B2C models” (p. 95) | Business Information Systems Engineering | 92 |
| 2016 | Shaheen, Chan and Gaynor | “Sharing economy is a popularized term for consumption focused on access to goods and services through borrowing and renting rather than owning them” (p. 165) | Transport Policy | 39 |
| 2016 | Tussyadiah and Pesonen | “A new socioeconomic system that allows for shared creation, production, distribution, and consumption of goods and resources among individuals” (p. 1022) | Journal of Travel Research | 86 |
| 2017 | Sundararajan | “The sharing economy is an economic system with the following 5 characteristics: largely market based, high impact capital, crowd based networks, blurring lines between the personal and professional, and blurring lines between fully employed and casual labor” (p. 23) | The Sharing Economy: the End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism | 1253* |
| 2017 | Acquier, Daudigeos and Pinkse | “Umbrella concept that rests on three foundational cores—(1) Access economy, (2) Platform economy, and (3) Community-based economy” (p. 1) | Technological Forecasting and Social Change | 126 |
| 2017 | Frenken and Schor | “Consumers granting each other temporary access to under-utilized physical assets (idle capacity), possibly for money” (pp. 4 and 5) | Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions | 243 |
| 2017 | Habibi, Davidson and Laroche | “Non-ownership forms of consumption activities such as swapping, bartering, trading, renting, sharing and exchanging” (p. 113) | Business Horizons | 67 |
| 2017 | Muñoz and Cohen | “A socioeconomic system enabling an intermediated set of exchanges of goods and services between individuals and organizations which aim to increase efficiency and optimization of under-utilized resources in society” (p. 21) | Technological Forecasting and Social Change | 74 |
| 2018 | Arvidsson | “A new arena of economic action that builds…on common resources that are in themselves not directly susceptible to market exchange” (p. 289) | Sociological Review | 9 |
| 2018 | Perren and Kozinets | “A lateral exchange market (LEM) as a market that is formed through an intermediating technology platform that facilitates exchange activities among a network of equivalently positioned economic actors” (p. 21) | Journal of Marketing | 47 |
| 2019 | Curtis and Lehner | “Sharing economy for sustainability indicate those sharing practices that promote sustainable consumption compared to purely market-based exchanges” (p. 1) | Sustainability | 27 |
| 2019 | Dellaert | “Consumer coproduction networks as value creation systems in which part of the capital goods and services are provided by individual consumers rather than firms, including consumer co-production that is provided for a commercial purpose” (p. 240) | Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science | 20 |
| 2019 | Eckhardt, Houston, Jiang, Lamberton, Rindfleisch and Zervas | “A scalable socioeconomic system that employs technology-enabled platforms to provide users with temporary access to tangible and intangible resources that may be crowdsourced” (p. 3) | Journal of Marketing | 35 |
| 2019 | Guyader and Piscicelli | “Business and consumption practices that are based on sharing underutilized resources (e.g., goods, services, and spaces) for free or for a fee, typically enabled by online platforms and peer communities” (p. 1060) | Journal of Cleaner Production | 10 |
| 2019 | Wang, Wang, Chai, Wang and Zhang | “A transformative model that has changed the modern human lifestyle and reshaped traditional ways of doing business by combining online and offline resources and serving people by enabling the rental, sharing or exchanging of property without any permanent transfer of ownership” (p. 1011) | Information Technology and People | 1 |
| 2019 | Davlembayeva, Papagiannidis and Alamanos | “The sharing economy is a socio-economic system in which individuals acquire and distribute goods and services among each other for free or for compensation through internet platforms” (p. 1) | Information Technology and People | 2 |
| 2020 | Gao and Li | “The sharing economy constitutes a circular economy that emphasizes sharing and reusing” (p. 2) | Journal of Cleaner Production | 1 |
| 2020 | Gerwe and Silva | “A socioeconomic system that allows peers to grant temporary access to their underutilized physical and human assets through online platforms” (p. 71) | Academy of Management Perspectives | 8 |
| 2020 | Akhmedova, Mas-Machuca, and Marimon | “The sharing economy is an internet-enabled, platform-based and trust-verified interactions of individuals or entities with the goal of providing temporary access or full ownership to idle assets in ex-change for monetary or nonmonetary compensation, that allows management of individual resources in ways that bypass traditional institutions” (p. 1) | Journal of Cleaner Production | 0 |
| 2020 | Govindan, Shankar and Kannan | “An economic system in which assets (man, machine, materials) and/or services are shared between industries (2 or more), with the mutual consent with the means of technology” (p. 2) | International Journal of Production Economics | 9 |
| 2020 | Yu, Xu, Yu, Sang, Yang and Jiang | “A new generation of manufacturing that supports shared consumption between individuals by allowing the provision and access of the layered SharedMfg Service (SMS, instances of PSS/CSS/RSS) through a P2P manner” (p. 4) | Computer and Industrial Engineering | 0 |
| 2020 | Sanasi, Ghezzi, Cavallo and Rangone | “The socioeconomic system enabled by digital platforms, where businesses or individuals share and exchange access to tangible and intangible assets; and receive a monetary and/or nonmonetary compensation in return” (p. 4) | Technology Analysis and Strategic management | 5 |
| 2020 | Berg, Slettemeås, Kjørstad and Rosenberg | “Transactions of consumer goods and service between peers, matched and facilitated by digital platforms” (p. 222) | International Journal of Consumer Studies | 1 |
| 2020 | Fahmy | “An activity facilitated by digital online platforms where people rent their skills (such as driving) and make their resources (such a properties or cars) available for money” (p. 281) | Journal of Applied Economics | 0 |
| 2020 | Curtis and Mont | “A socio-economic system that leverages technology to mediate two-sided markets, which facilitate temporary access to goods that are under-utilized, tangible, and rivalrous” (p. 4) | Journal of Cleaner Production | 3 |
| 2020 | Hazée, Zwienenber, Van Vaerenbergh, Faseur, Vandenberghanand Keutgens | “Collaborative consumption involves triadic exchange practices (i.e. platform provider-service provider-customer); the digital platform provider does not own the resources or assets being (temporary) shared and is therefore able to scale up very rapidly; the core service provider is usually a nonprofessional individual (also referred to as “peer service provider”); and interactions between actors must occur to ensure service delivery” (p. 4) | Journal of Service Management | 2 |
| 2020 | Kim and Kim | “The sharing economy is an economic model in which participants share an under-utilized inventory or assets via fee-based sharing between peers” (p. 2814) | Sustainability | 1 |
| 2020 | Zmyślony, Leszczyński, Waligóra and Alejziak | “The sharing economy encompasses business-to-business, business-to-consumer and peer-to-peer initiatives—driven both for-profit and non-profit motivations—which are based on and combine at least three following foundation cores: the platform economy, in terms of intermediating decentralised exchanges among peers through digital platforms; the access economy, in terms of sharing under-utilized assets to optimize their use, offering services instead of products; the community-based economy, in terms of coordinating initiatives through non-contractual, non-hierarchical or non-monetized forms of interaction” (p. 4) | Sustainability | 1 |
| 2020 | Fielbaum and Tirachini | “The exchange of capital, assets, and services between individuals through internet-based platforms for the sharing of underutilised resources at a low transaction cost” (p. 4) | Transportation | 0 |
| 2020 | Lee | “The sharing economy is characterized by peer-to-peer practices in which underused assets or services are acquired, provided, or exchanged for a fee, and organized through community-based online services” (p. 2) | International Journal of Hospitality Management | 1 |
| 2020 | Wu and Yan | “The sharing economy (a.k.a. shareconomy, access, collaborative, and peer economy) refers to a class of economic arrangements in which asset owners and users mutualize access to products or services associated with these assets” (p. 11) | Asian Business and Management | 2 |
| 2020 | Huang and Kuo | “An economic system in which underutilized assets (e.g. property, resources, time and skills) are shared between individuals, either for a fee or for any kind of reciprocity, typically by means of the internet” (p. 806) | Online Information Review | 0 |
*Citations of definitions from books based on Google Scholar