Options
A Case-based Study on the Sharing Economy and its Platform Business Models
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Yang, Han-Ju
Abstract
The sharing economy serves as an alternative to consume economically after the financial crisis in 2008. Sellers and buyers are two types of participants in the sharing economy. While sellers can earn extra income by selling personal idle capacity, buyers will benefit from a cheaper way to consume products or services, as well as more personal choices due to the sharing economy’s feature to consume access instead of ownership. Therefore, we would like to discover the key successful factors of the sharing economy business through extracting the logic and understanding the business model based on case study on three different companies and models characterized by the sharing economy. This thesis encompasses two major parts. We first postulate a conceptual framework that is able to distinguishes the differences among sharing economy, regular market, rental market and auction market. This framework is defined by transaction objective and transaction model. The second part tries to conclude key successful factors of the sharing economy business by analyzing the collective and diverse principles undertaken by these three cases. We found that the common logic of the sharing economy is its value proposition of economic gain. In contrast, differences lie in the distinct designs of the key process according to various levels of immediateness in the services. In addition, the network effect will be influenced by the essence of the services. Next, we suggest that the successful factors of building the sharing economy business is to grow supply and promote consumption by focusing on eliminating the barrier and boost the usage of the business platform with effective mechanism design. Finally, we further discussed three external factors: the boundary between the sharing economy and the leasing market, legal issues and the cultural differences, that are critical for the development of the sharing economy in the future.
Subjects
Sharing Economy
Platform Model
Value Proposition
Type
thesis
File(s)
No Thumbnail Available
Name
ntu-104-R01724093-1.pdf
Size
23.32 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum
(MD5):6e99d8a4a6dc37d0188a620202330efa