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Abstract |
Kotler (1972) defines marketing as “the set of human activities directed at facilitating and consummating exchanges” (p.12). Ordinarily, these exchanges are associated with permanent ownership between buyers and sellers. However, the advances of the internet and mobile technology have enabled buyers and sellers to exchange offerings that exponentially contribute to temporary access rather than ownership — as such, sharing as a form of consumption begin to emerge and numerous practices coined under this umbrella term. At the core, the phenomenon includes a variety of different products and services such as lodging (e.g., Airbnb), tools (e.g., ShareGrid), transportation (e.g., Uber), workspace (e.g., WeWork), or food services (e.g., Deliveroo). The term of the “Sharing Economy” was first mentioned in 2008 and defined as the “collaborative consumption made by the activities of sharing, exchanging, and rental of resources without owning the goods” (Lessig 2008, p.143). After that, this phenomenon, or aspects of it, has been given many different names, including “collaborative consumption”, “commercial sharing systems” (and “access-based consumption”, “shared consumption”, “on-demand economy”, “collaborative economy”, “platform economy” and “gig economy”. Many of these terms share similar set of characteristics, yet, the definition articulates the entire set of characteristics formed by Eckhardt et al. (2019), who define the sharing economy as “a scalable socio-economic system that employs technology-enabled platforms to provide users with temporary access to tangible and intangible resources that may be crowdsourced” (Eckhardt et al., 2019 p.7).The interest in participating in sharing systems is generally characterized as prosocial or sustainable behavior such as sharing, helping others, taking care of the environment. However, participating in sharing systems can also bring economic benefits like saving money or facilitating access to resources, which can form more individualistic reasons for participating in sharing economy practices. Previous research has shown that monetary motivations, environmental and societal concerns, flexibility, variety seeking, sustainability, community belonging, enjoyment and trust are among several factors that enhance participation in the sharing economy. Although there is growing attention for research on consumer behaviour in the sharing economy, the findings regarding antecedents and outcomes of participating in these services are scattered and contradicting with previous findings. The existing literature offers broad range of antecedents for sharing economy; however, researchers disagree on which one best captures the value. Albeit little amount of literature reviews has been added to the field, and a quantifiable estimation of the relationship between the antecedents and outcomes has not been investigated yet. The inconsistency of previous research supports the need for meta-analysis to integrate the accumulated empirical research, to see the landscape of the research area, and provide comprehensive understanding on which antecedents are the most effective for sharing services. Based on these grounds, the paper aims to answer the research question: What are the main customer-focused antecedents of the sharing economy and to what extend do these antecedents influence the behavioural intention towards the sharing economy services? |
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