The Origin of the Sharing Economy Meets the Legacy of Fractional Ownership

Francesco Pasimeni

SPRU Working Paper Series from SPRU - Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex Business School

Abstract: The sharing economy is changing the consumption and ownership of goods. As consumption becomes more and more characterised by sharing and access-based consumption, ownership is becoming more concentrated. The literature on the sharing economy focuses almost exclusively on shared consumption practices and rather overlooks the question of ownership despite a substantial body of work on forms of shared ownership, that is, fractional ownership. In this paper, I study the extent of the linking between these two streams of work and whether they have a common conceptual base. I analyse the citations networks of these academic literatures, using the Leiden algorithm of community detection and main-path analysis. I find that the sharing economy literature originated in consumer research that debates over sharing as opposed to possession, and in work on transaction costs. I draw on the strand of work on fractional ownership and identify three sharing economy aspects: psychological ownership, anticommons and exclusion of group cooperation. The findings allow a better understanding of the characteristics of the sharing economy and open avenues for future research on fractional ownership models in the sharing economy.

Keywords: Sharing Economy; Fractional Ownership; Leiden Community Detection, MainPath Analysis, Citation Network (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hme
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sru:ssewps:2020-19

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