Measuring value in the sharing economy: understanding the types of value that producers and consumers derive from decentralised transactions

The ‘sharing economy’ refers to a loosely-defined group of organisations that develop Internet-enabled services. These organisations encourage peer-to-peer interaction either online or offline. In the media coverage the catch-all term ‘sharing economy’ is often used indiscriminately to refer to people lending, borrowing, loaning, renting, giving and sharing their belongings. Typically, the services provide a platform for people to interact on rather than actually selling direct to consumers.

The service providers rarely own the objects that circulate, but instead enable transactions between people. Websites and applications provide a means for people to search a database and subsequently interact with other people rather than the organisation. Despite the surge in people using sharing economy services the economic activity mediated by these organisations is poorly understood and the aggregate national statistics are chronically simplistic. As yet, there is no longitudinal repository of public data on the sharing economy that can be used to inform economic policy.

The broad aim of this research project is to better understand the types of value that producers and consumers derive from decentralised transactions (See Woodall, 2003; Woodall et al., 2017). At present the definitions used to define the interactions between consumers in the sharing economy are hazily understood (Belk, 2014). This is problematic because policymakers in this area have arguably failed to address the disruption caused by innovation. The results of this thesis will be used to form a focal point around which academics and policymakers can coalesce.

The methods proposed for the project combine a mix of qualitative and quantitative approaches, particularly drawing on recent work in this area examining informal economic relations (Harvey et al, 2014; Harvey, 2016). The approach will implement a novel means of analysing economic relations at scale that departs from traditional exchange-based methods.