Sharing Economy

The consumer and environmental potential of the Sharing Economy: motives, barriers and rebound effects.

Consumers all over the world are increasingly using ICTs to share with others their ‘underutilized’ products (e.g. cars, appliances, tools). Although these online sharing models are expected to reduce environmental impacts of consumption, ‘rebound effects’ might be counterintuitively leading to increased resource use and emissions.

Current research suggests that we might be confronted with different sharing and consuming behaviors across consumer types, and with different types and magnitudes of rebound effects. Thus, there is the need to tailor measures within platforms to the specific consumer typologies to minimize potential rebound effects of sharing.

In our project we tackle this problem using an inter- and transdisciplinary approach. First, we analyze the motivations, perceptions and spending activities of the users of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) platforms. Second, we quantify the extent of the rebound effect and the related environmental impacts. Finally, together with our partners (platform providers) we develop and test measures to reduce the environmental impact of the sharing practices.

In more concrete terms, the project addresses the following main research questions:

• How do different consumer groups (e.g., age, gender, education) differ in respect to (i) types of goods willing to provide and to access; (ii) motives and barriers for providing and accessing products; and (iii) motives and barriers for spending the money saved/freed-up through sharing practices? What is their awareness of potential rebound effects and how does it affect their behavior?
• How do users spend their monetary savings or earnings and what is the environmental impact associated with that new expenditure? How large are the environmental impacts of income and substitution rebound effects? For which goods and consumer types are the latter likely to be high? Do the consumer groups differ in respect to their environmental impact?
• What mechanisms can be used to leverage the rebound effects? How are those different for different consumer groups and different types of goods?