Online and Offline Communities in the Sharing Economy

Abstract

Abstract:The online community is crucial to sharing economy platforms because without it, no transactions can take place. Online communities have been studied extensively, but so far, little attention has been paid to how they link to different offline communities, such as geographic (e.g., neighborhoods) and relational communities (e.g., friends and colleagues). In this study, we address this gap by examining the importance of communities to the users and the entrepreneurs of the goods-sharing platform Ecomodo. We conduct a qualitative content analysis of archival and interview data to uncover the importance of different communities and the relationships among them. We discover that the platform design aimed to facilitate lending and borrowing in relational communities. However, geographic communities were more important to the users since most of them joined the platform to be acquainted with their neighbors. We also find that the platform entrepreneurs underestimated the behavioral changes needed to use the platform. The producers were not used to asking for money to lend their possessions, and it was difficult to teach consumers to borrow instead of buying. We use these findings to offer recommendations to practitioners and discuss some avenues for further research.

Sharing economy business models for sustainability

“…Platforms use smartphone apps , web-based platforms and other third-party applications to mediate sharing between users ( Aboulamer, 2018 ; Gonzalez-Padron, 2017 ). The initial attribute of openness was changed to intellectual property , as several authors discuss open source characteristics of business models in the sharing economy ( Lobbers et al., 2017 ; Muñoz and Cohen, 2018 ; Spulber, 2019 ; Vaskelainen and Piscicelli, 2018 ). Other authors discussed intellectual property rights ( Fraga-Lamas and Fernández-Caramés, 2019 ; Hamalainen and Karjalainen, 2017 ; Hou, 2018 ), which seemed to be a better fit in describing both the type of resources used by platforms and the openness of platforms to share these resources.…”

An Institutional Logics Perspective on the Gig Economy

“…Cooperatives then, would most likely emerge from local communities that use a platform to serve local consumers, as in most gig economy and sharing economy markets. In such context, an online community of providers can easily interact offline as well (Reischauer & Mair, 2018;Vaskelainen & Piscicelli, 2018), thus leveraging the physical proximity of providers operating in local markets. In particular cases, the membership of a platform co-op may be tight formally to a membership of a (national) professional organization as well, or otherwise informally to professional values and identities.…”

How Is Motivation Generated in Collaborative Consumption: Mediation Effect in Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivation

“…Albinsson and Perera [11] believed that individuals involved in collaborative consumption have established communities through shared activities. Vaskelainen and Piscicelli [31] found that offline communities are as important as online communities. In C2C-style collaborative consumption, direct human-to-human interaction and experience in sharing goods create and maintain social relationships with others, while, in B2C-style collaborative consumption, although there is no direct relationship between users, they may still think that they are part of a community that uses a certain common product, and this sense of community will make them feel psychologically fulfilled, happy and satisfied, thus increasing their intention to participate.…”