For my paper topic, I will write about the rise of collaborative
consumption. Collaborative consumption is a new trend in which people are
sharing, renting, and trading their real and personal property.
The driving logic behind collaborative consumption is that it is expensive
and wasteful to buy things that we are not using constantly. A bicycle sitting idle in a garage provides
no value to anyone. As a result, at a
local level communities have developed different sharing or renting
services. However, collaborative consumption
is not just an underground movement catering to the granola set. It is becoming a sizeable market in itself as
for-profit companies join the fold.
Businesses such as AirBnB (home rentals), Car2Go (car sharing service)
are making profits based on aggregating consumer demand for shared/rental
services and charging a transaction or usage fee. I am particularly interested
in topic because I am co-founding a mobile peer-to-peer company. Our company is called reQwip and it is a
mobile marketplace for people to buy, sell, rent and donate used sporting
goods. The rental portion of our company
is a form of collaborative consumption.
Collaborative consumption has the potential to disrupt existing
business models and change how people purchase goods. Knowing that I can easily rent or share a
lawnmower with my neighbor will change my purchase behaviors. I am very interested to learn the psychology
behind why people are willing or not willing to rent or share things with
strangers. From a customer insights perspective, there are a number of
experiments I can conduct to understand what are the underlying factors that
influence a person’s decision to engage in collaborative consumption. One potential exercise would be to do an in
home visit and ask someone for each of their durable goods would they be
willing to rent or loan it. This
exercise might reveal in some cases that people have sentimental and
psychological attachments to certain seemingly commodity goods. Or for some people, they might be willing to
lend or rent very personal goods.
For my research, I will start by reading the book “What’s MineIs Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption” by Botsman and Rogers. This book released in 2010 profiles three
different models of collaborative consumption.
The first model is called Product Service Systems, and is compromised of
individuals that use a sharing service (such as Zipcar) for a product instead
of owning that product. The second
model is Communal Economies such as Etsy in which individuals not corporations
are creating products to sell to each other.
The third model is Redistribution Markets in which people engage in
bartering (eBay) or swap trading (Zwaggle)
in order to reuse or resell used items.
Additionally, I will look for market research reports that
quantify the financial impact of collaborative consumption. I will also look for studies that have
researched the rationale and psychology behind selling, renting, and swapping
existing gear.