Sharing Economy Theory

Literature Review
Theories surrounding the Sharing Economy concept
During the last decade a new economic concept has raised awareness over the business and academic world the so called “sharing economy” (Belk 2014 a, 2014 b; Hamari et al., 2015; Mohlmann, 2015;) It is hard to give a clear definition to “sharing economy” that contains all the different ways in which the term is used in practice (Schor, 2014). The rising popularity of this phenomenon and the emergence of several non-profit and for-profit organizations (Lessig 2008) have raised scholar’s attention. Although in many cases different approaches seem to complement each other and present overlapping ideas.
In order to give a clear understanding about the concept to the reader of this

There is a continuously increase in the number of people who have shifted their consuming behavior and started to consume through PSS. This shift has flustered the traditional industry’s models where an individual should own a product in order to enjoy its usage’s benefits. Such systems provide services where several products owned by an organization (eg Zipcar, BMW drive now) can be shared with many different consumers or privately owned products can be shared or rented peer-to-peer (eg Zilok). The value for the environment is coming from the fact that a previously privately owned product “with often limited usage is replaced with a shared service that maximizes its utility” (p. 72) (Botsman and Rogers, 2011). In the same way of thinking, Mont (2002), by examining different approaches and trends towards this concept, he had pinpointed the importance of shifting to such systems (PSS) whose elements are combined in a way that offers a certain quality of life to customers while in parallel maximize the environmental protection. Moreover Vezzoli etal.(2012) suggests that Product-Service Systems are able to address the raised challenges regarding to societal and environmental problems in the existing traditional ways of production and consumption. On the other hand users can benefit because they don’t have to pay for the ownership of a product and its related burdens such as repairs, insurance and maintance are removed. In addition the options to satisfy one’s needs increase by shifting consuming behavior from ownership to usage of products (Botsman and Rogers,