Sharing economy

The sharing economy is a socio-economic system whereby consumers share in the creation, production, distribution, trade and consumption of goods, and services. These systems take a variety of forms, often leveraging information technology and the Internet, particularly digital platforms, to facilitate the distribution, sharing and reuse of excess capacity in goods and services. It can be facilitated by nonprofit organizations, usually based on the concept of book-lending libraries, in which goods and services are provided for free (or sometimes for a modest subscription) or by commercial entities, in which a company provides a service to customers for profit. It relies on the will of the users to share and the overcoming of stranger danger. Dariusz Jemielniak and Aleksandra Przegalinska credit Marcus Felson and Joe L. Spaeth's academic article "Community Structure and Collaborative Consumption" published in 1978 with coining the term economy of sharing. The term "sharing economy" began to appear around the time of the Great Recession, enabling social technologies, and an increasing sense of urgency around global population growth and resource depletion. Lawrence Lessig was possibly first to use the term in 2008, though others claim the origin of the term is unknown. There is a conceptual and semantic confusion caused by the many facets of Internet-based sharing leading to discussions regarding the boundaries and the scope of the sharing economy and regarding the definition of the sharing economy. Arun Sundararajan noted in 2016 that he is "unaware of any consensus on a definition of the sharing economy". As of 2015, according to a Pew Research Center survey, only 27% of Americans had heard of the term "sharing economy". Survey respondents who had heard of the term had divergent views on what it meant, with many thinking it concerned "sharing" in the traditional sense of the term. The term "sharing economy" is often used in an ambiguous way and can imply different characteristics.