Abstract
The sharing economy, a term we use to refer to business models built around on-demand access to products and services mediated by online platforms that match many small suppliers or service providers to many small buyers, has emerged as an important area of study in operations management. We first describe three “canonical” applications that have garnered much attention from the operations management community. We use these applications to highlight distinguishing features of sharing economy business models and to point out research questions that are new. Then we draw connections between classical operations management theory and models and those that have been used to study sharing economy applications. We do so to put in context some of the recent work on the sharing economy and to showcase the underlying modeling toolkit and identify opportunities for future research.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 93-101 |
Number of pages | 9 |
Journal | Manufacturing and Service Operations Management |
Volume | 22 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The research of S. Benjaafar is in part funded by the United States National Science Foundation [Award SCC-1831140 (Leveraging Autonomous Shared Vehicles for Greater Community Health, Equity, Livability, and Prosperity)]. The research of M. Hu is in part supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [Grant RGPIN-2015-06757] and National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant 71825007].
Funding Information:
Funding: The research of S. Benjaafar is in part funded by the United States National Science Foundation [Award SCC-1831140 (Leveraging Autonomous Shared Vehicles for Greater Community Health, Equity, Livability, and Prosperity)]. The research of M. Hu is in part supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [Grant RGPIN-2015-06757] and National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant 71825007].
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 INFORMS
Keywords
- Dynamic matching
- Dynamic pricing
- Matching markets
- On-demand rental networks
- On-demand service platforms
- Peer-to-peer resource sharing
- Sharing economy