The current sharing economy suffers from system-wide deficiencies even as it produces distinctive benefits and advantages for some participants. The first generation of sharing markets has left us to question: Will there be any workers in the sharing economy? Can we know enough about these technologies to regulate them? Is there any way to avoid the monopolization of assets, information, and wealth? Using convergent, transdisciplinary perspectives, this volume examines the challenge of reengineering a sharing economy that is more equitable, democratic, sustainable, and just. The volume enhances the reader’s capacity for integrating applicable findings and theories in business, law and social science into ethical engineering design and practice. At the same time, the book helps explain how technological innovations in the sharing economy create value for different stakeholders and how they impact society at large. Reengineering the Sharing Economy is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The sharing economy has changed the nature of how we procure goods and services, with implications for physical resources and emissions that affect our environment and our health. Through an examination of sharing across three sectors – transportation, housing, and goods – this chapter describes how sharing platforms influence the physical economy. In some cases, sharing appears to fulfil its promise of reducing material consumption and emissions through pooled demand, but in other cases, systems-level effects can lead to increases in resource demands, emissions, and environmental impacts. Based on these potential trade-offs, we advocate for four measures that improve the environmental outcomes of sharing platforms: (1) Design algorithms to emphasize proximity; (2) Encourage low-carbon transportation options for sharing transactions; (3) Model the system and mitigate unintended effects; and (4) Focus sharing on transactions with the highest environmental benefits. Finally, there are additional opportunities for sharing platforms to effect positive environmental change through research, by harnessing their data to answer important environmental engineering and policy questions.

This chapter argues that many of the fundamental challenges of sharing economy platforms can best be understood and dealt with by considering these platforms embedded in a sociotechnical ecosystem. This perspective also enables us to formulate many crucial questions about the design, governance, and regulation of sharing economy platforms. The chapter also provides a set of differentiating dimensions that can help with classifying various sharing economy platforms, guide decisions regarding ecosystem boundaries, and shape more relevant sociotechnical questions and hypotheses for a given sharing economy. Finally, the chapter provides a few examples of ecosystem-motivated issues and questions that include a broader consideration of socioeconomic externalities, decisions about modes of platform governance and the relative weight of internal versus external regulations, and public–private partnerships.

Last mile delivery is the most expensive part of the delivery operations. Especially with the significant growth in e-commerce, last mile delivery operations continue to increase. Since most of the parcels are delivered to urban and suburban areas, the delivery operations have a considerable impact on our lives, by increasing the air and noise pollution and worsening the traffic within cities. The crowdsourcing and sharing economy approaches, such as crowdsourced delivery and shared urban distribution centers, in last mile delivery may reduce these negative externalities. However, since these approaches are relatively new and bring new aspects that were not part of the conventional business models, open questions arise in both business applications and academic research. In this chapter, we provide a brief history of e-commerce and related optimization literature. We introduce several sharing economy business models in last mile delivery and discuss the open problems that might be studied by comparing these business models to the conventional ones.

Online marketplaces have permeated many aspects of our lives, as we use them to procure goods and services of all sorts, and many have relied on them during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Both sides of the market must feel comfortable trusting each other for online marketplaces to thrive, and for that, they need to have safeguards that alleviate the problems caused by asymmetric information. In this chapter I explain how feedback and reputation systems work in practice, and how they support ecommerce in online marketplaces. It starts by covering the theory behind reputation mechanisms and how they support more efficient trade, followed by descriptions of the actual working of typical online feedback and reputation systems. A survey of empirical findings from a host of papers is presented that explore how reputation works in actual online marketplaces, and how these relate to the theory. I then highlight some of the shortcomings of feedback systems and offer some suggestions and considerations for the future design of feedback and reputation systems that can augment their effectiveness.

The sharing economy is transformative in that it decentralizes services by permitting direct transactions between individuals. A less recognized consequence is that it also decentralizes the geography of services, shifting their distribution away from major business districts and into residential communities. We present a three-part generalized theory for studying and developing policy responses to the arrival of these services in neighborhoods where they were not previously available. First, one must quantify the distribution of the new services across neighborhoods. Second, these geographic shifts in supply and demand can generate positive and negative externalities for communities, which might be hypothesized and tested for empirically. Third, policy responses can be developed based on the knowledge generated by components 1 and 2. We illustrate this proposed theory by examining the incursion of Airbnb short-term rentals into the neighborhoods of Boston, MA for 2010 to 2018. We demonstrate that Airbnb listings quickly grew into neighborhoods away from the downtown core where hotels are concentrated and hypothesize how this might increase investment in local buildings (measured through building permits), activity at local food establishments (measured through the number of new licenses), and crime (measured through 911 reports). We find initial evidence for increased investment through building permits and limited evidence for increased violent crime, but no evidence for increases in food establishments. This can then guide how cities regulate short-term rentals to maximize benefits and minimize negative impacts. We conclude by exploring how the theory might be applied to other forms of the sharing economy.

On-demand mobility services and Transportation Network Companies (TNC) are transforming urban mobility by providing more flexibility and improved level of service to users. However, they also raise concerns about their impact on congestion, vehicle miles traveled (VMT), and competition with transit. Considering the popularity of TNC services, increasing ride-pooling is, potentially, an important means to address these concerns. While companies attempt to promote ride-pooling with pricing strategies, evidence suggests that shared trips are a small fraction of all trips. We review the literature on the impact of TNC on congestion and ridership of alternative sustainable modes and discuss opportunities to improve sharing performance. We examine two such opportunities: Alternative operating models that use advanced booking to improve shareability; and collaboration with traditional transit. In the first case, we use a large TNC data set to assess the benefits of advanced booking in terms of increasing shared trips and reducing VMT. The results suggest that even with short advanced request horizons, significant benefits can be realized, with little deterioration of the level of service that customers experience. In the second case, we review results from various partnerships between TNCs and transit agencies and highlight the main characteristics.

Improving urban mobility systems has been one of the main engineering challenges especially in large cities and metropolitan areas. Since their emergence, ridesharing services have had a promising outlook on disrupting the current urban transportation system and using technology to solve its problems. However, studies on their current and projected future accomplishments towards this goal are divided. Despite being supported by many well-designed studies, many recent studies point out the new problems caused by these services or the exacerbation of the old problems after their entry to the mobility services mix of a city. This chapter reviews the research from both sides and describes policy measures and research gaps that could help mitigate such potential negative impacts on traffic congestion and improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the urban mobility systems.

This chapter explores the integrated potential of future technological and social innovations enabling sharing in future energy systems. Energy systems around the world are undergoing a transformation toward more distributed, renewable-based configurations where new mechanisms for “sharing” are evolving. Future energy systems are likely to integrate a regionally appropriate mix of electricity generation that is dispatched, stored, and distributed through sophisticated platforms that enable sharing of electricity at multiple scales. Sharing in future energy systems has the potential to radically disrupt relationships governing utilities, energy consumers, and distributed electricity generation at the individual and household levels, at the community and organizational levels, and at the regional, state, national, and even international levels. Innovations may allow formerly passive consumers to become actively engaged in producing and managing electricity which could shift the locus of organizational decision making and control away from traditional utilities. Prosumers who can “share” their electricity may be empowered to change the rules that have governed their relationships with utilities for the past century. We consider a potential “death spiral of utilities’ business model” as new sharing platforms, including community-level energy cooperatives, emerge to replace the conventional approach to managing and distributing energy. This chapter also explores how future energy sharing might connect with the concept of energy democracy.

A defining feature of twenty-first-century capitalism is the emergence of platform labor. While still small, many scholars are convinced it will grow significantly, with far-reaching effects on work. To date, the literature is unsettled on questions such as how “algorithmic management” reshapes power and authority over labor, impacts on conventional jobs, inclusion in the labor market, regulatory requirements, and labor struggles. In this chapter we outline the main lines of contention, identify major gaps in knowledge, and suggest areas for future research. We begin by sketching three dominant themes: A hopeful view, in which platforms expand the range of freedoms and autonomy that income earners enjoy; a technology-centered approach, in which algorithms and digital surveillance and evaluation establish greater management control over labor; and a view in which platforms accelerate a trend toward precarious forms of work. We identify one source of complexity that yields continuing contention: Heterogeneity in the workforce, with varying segments of labor differentially positioned with respect to the platforms themselves. We end by alluding to regulatory struggles and forms of worker mobilization and speculate about possible paths that might yield more humane yet innovative uses of the platform paradigm.

This chapter reviews the first generation of sharing economy regulations and proposes an approach for developing the second generation of regulations. In the first section, the chapter argues that first-generation sharing economy regulations rely on legal categories and assumptions that have been used to address business operations that have developed over decades (sometimes centuries), but that such legal approaches are at times ill-suited to regulation of the sharing economy. In the second section, the chapter argues for a new regulatory approach that directly addresses core principles or values in the sharing economy. The chapter focuses in particular on four core principles that ought to serve as foundations for the next generation of sharing economy regulations.

This chapter provides an overview of five core dimensions that are central to the challenge of optimizing for a just sharing economy: Understanding socioeconomic externalities; pursuing resilience; charting more just and systems-oriented business directions; defining the future of work; and prioritizing access and equity. It highlights the multiple ways in which the analyses throughout the book intersect with these dimensions and argues that each of these dimensions conveys significant information about the values that must be prioritized in the next generation of sharing economy platforms. Finally, the chapter discusses a set of key questions that remain for future research and exploration.

Addiction to cigarettes governed my father’s life and death. He smoked heavily and eventually became sick with emphysema. My father could have avoided his painful final years hooked to an oxygen tank by quitting smoking when he was diagnosed. But he chose otherwise. We desperately tried to resist his decision by taking his cigarettes away. He reacted with uncharacteristic anger, exercising every means at his disposal to get his cigarette pack back. We eventually gave up.

I always had a complicated relationship with technology. I would like it, then realize I like it too much, and then try to disentangle from it. I went through several cycles of this. As a young girl in the 1970s, I spent far too much time playing video games. Then in the 1990s, I spent every spare minute during one college semester playing a dungeon treasure hunt computer game. I stopped only after I convinced a friend to place a password on the game to prevent my access. Then came email. I simply could not stop checking it. In my first apartment in New York City as a graduate student, I endlessly connected and disconnected my modem to check my emails. But for me and for many others, 2009 was the year when things started changing. This was the year that smartphones and Facebook became popular.1 Suddenly, we could text, email, access the Internet, and engage in social interactions practically anywhere and anytime.