Paper Topic - Collaborative Consumption

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.