Journal of Marketing | 2019
Commentary: Marketing and the Sharing Economy: Digital Economy and Emerging Market Challenges
Abstract
The sharing economy is changing consumer and firm behavior around the world. We present two challenges to the proposed view of marketing in the sharing economy. First, we argue that the critical feature of the sharing economy is not its crowdsourced nature, but rather its digital-economy nature, which means data are now considered the key factor of production that drives how markets are organized and operate. Second, the market environment for the sharing economy in emerging markets lacks the institutional basis found in developed markets, which creates unique consumer and firm problems. These two challenges change marketing within the sharing economy in ways important to practitioners and scholars.