The sharing economy, the role of technology in its current expansion and the future of it.
We all learned about sharing and taking turns in kindergarten. Now, those two basic concepts are shaking up the technology business as corporations take underutilized assets and make them available to the public. This new Sharing Economy is upending traditional company models and ushering in a new age of peer-to-peer, access-driven enterprises.
PwC set out to investigate how this sharing environment will affect the IT industry, as well as the seismic upheavals it is causing in other industries. Most importantly, we wanted to know what organizations might do to better position themselves ahead of this wave of disruption and capitalize on new income streams.
The effect of technology has spread to many other areas. The Internet, in particular, has served as the backbone of the sharing economy, serving as the primary conduit via which consumers and companies may engage in the sharing marketplace. Companies must understand how their goods and services impact their customers' value in delivery frameworks. Notably, within the sharing economy, from real-time transactions via mobile and cloud technology, to consumers sharing social feedback.
In the case of vehicle sharing, for example, the Internet gives mobile access into a marketplace, an exquisite user experience through which customers may make a purchase, and all of the prerequisites to continue the transaction in a technologically seamless manner.
Tech companies have a one-of-a-kind opportunity to shape the sharing economy. Does yours?
Is the sharing economy truly sharing or concentrating society resources?
The sharing economy's most ardent supporters hail it as a paradigm in which trade and community coexist together, so that the pursuit of one does not come at the price of the other. According to this viewpoint, the sharing economy is a vehicle that will bring us to a society where not only are social resources more fully exploited, but also the efficiency advantages from greater asset utilization are equitably distributed.
Evidence of lower costs and a wider range of alternatives on sharing economy platforms suggests that the rapidly increasing sharing economy has increased asset utilization, but it is unclear if accompanying welfare gains are distributed evenly. Rising anti-sharing economy rallies in numerous nations point to a dismal future. As will be explored in this section, there are various unequalizing processes at work in the sharing economy that, if not counteracted, might aggravate inequality.
The sharing economy High-tech "disruptors," armed with massive consumer data and proprietary and self-improving algorithms that immediately interpret such data, have been able to extract rents by intermediating encounters in the sharing economy in unprecedented ways. These corporations are influencing people's consumption habits on a huge scale, influencing the environmental, social, and economic behaviors of millions of individuals who offer and utilize their ultimate services. The sharing economy's expected continuous expansion poses the question of how the rising advantages will be allocated among producers, customers, and intermediaries.
The digital sharing shifts
To describe digital sharing, we use a transition-centric approach to examine how sharing has adapted to and developed alongside the opportunities afforded by the spread of digital ICT. These potentials primarily include new methods of organizing sharing practices through online digital platforms. The expanding technological capability of coordination allows for the inclusion of more players, the creation of greater pools of sharable resources, and the inclusion of resources of increasing diversity.
The transition-centric approach clarifies what features of fundamental, conventional sharing remain and what has changed in digitally enabled sharing. We begin by reviewing several meanings of "sharing." We then characterize changes through what we label "the digital" based on these concepts.