The challenges and opportunities of sharing economy - A new wrapping for doing business online?

There is a recent discussion of the impact of sharing economy in the business field-renting, lending, and sharing goods and service instead of buying them is a new trend that is widely promoted by the innovative technologies and platforms. There are various new concepts and labels exist in the market describing this emerging phenomenon. However, the "label battle" caused so many confusions about what sharing economy exactly is, and thus people question the newness and the future of this industry. An exploration of the existing sharing economy websites through the directory of collabortaiveconsumption.com shows that sharing economy market distributes assets through four different systems-sharing, giving, access and exchange-among which access-based approach is the emerging form that dominates the sharing economy market. Additionally, peers play an increasing role, which indicates the growing market power of the individuals and the strong impact of the social network. A classification scheme of the existing business model is inductively developed based on web observation, which provides implications for both researchers and practitioners. Furthermore, a framework for future research is proposed that highlights the intersection of the level of analysis and the activities in sharing economy.