Owning, Using, and Renting: Some Simple Economics of the “Sharing Economy”
研究了互联网共享经济市场中消费者所有者向非所有者出租耐用品的短期与长期均衡，发现共享经济总是扩大消费和增加剩余，但可能增加或减少所有权，且长期中所有权与个人偏好脱钩。
New Internet-based “sharing-economy” markets enable consumer-owners to rent out their durable goods to nonowners. We model such markets and explore their equilibria both in the short run, in which ownership decisions are fixed, and in the long run, in which ownership decisions can be changed. We find that sharing-economy markets always expand consumption and increase surplus, but may increase or decrease ownership. Regardless, ownership is decoupled from individual preferences in the long run, as the rental rates and the purchase prices of goods become equal. If there are costs of bringing unused capacity to the market, they are partially passed through, creating a bias toward ownership. To test our theoretical work empirically, we conduct a survey of consumers, finding broad support for our modeling assumptions. The survey also allows us to offer a partial decomposition of the bring-to-market costs, based on attributes that make a good more or less amenable to being shared. This paper was accepted by Joshua Gans, business strategy.