Participation in the Sharing Economy

This report forms one part of a European Union Horizon 2020 Research Project on the sharing economy: Ps2Share ‘Participation, Privacy, and Power in the Sharing Economy’ (www.ps2share.eu). We aim to foster better awareness of the consequences which the sharing economy has on the way people behave, think, interact, and socialize across Europe. Our overarching objective is to identify key challenges of the sharing economy and improve Europe’s digital services through providing recommendations to Europe’s institutions. The initial stage of this Research Project involves a set of three literature reviews of the state of research on three core topics in relation to the sharing economy: participation (this report), privacy (Ranzini, Etter, Lutz, & Vermeulen, 2017), and power (Newlands, Lutz, & Fieseler, 2017). This study will proceed with some initial thoughts on the importance of participation in the sharing economy, deriving an analytical framework. It will then discuss the sociodemographic characteristics of sharers and non-sharers. Next, current findings on the motives and attitudes driving participation will be analyzed, followed by a differentiation of sharing behaviors and outcomes. This overview will conclude with some key findings as well as an outlook on critical questions for future research on participation in the sharing economy.