Notes on collaborative consumption

I'm going to explain what it is and try and convince you — in just 15 minutes — that this isn't a flimsy idea, or a short-term trend, but a powerful cultural and economic force reinventing not just what we consume, but how we consume. Now I'm going to start with a deceptively simple example. Hands up — how many of you have books, CDs, DVDs, or videos lying around your house that you probably won't use again, but you can't quite bring yourself to throw away?

Bartering and peer-to-peer renting, for example, have been used by societies for thousands of years. This is a way to provide a group of individuals with an asset without requiring each person to purchase it on his or her own.

Collaborative consumption is considered part of the sharing economy because it means that individuals rent out their underused assets. It is most likely to be used when both the price of a particular asset, such as a car, is high and the asset is not utilized at all times by one person.

By renting out an asset when it is not being used, its owner turns the asset into a sort of commodity. This creates a scenario where physical objects are treated as services. How Collaborative Consumption Raises Regulatory Concerns Critics of collaborative consumption argue that the informal nature of such arrangements allows individuals to bypass local regulations that businesses offering similar services must follow.

These businesses may have to pay licensing or other regulatory-related fees in order to legally operate. Those fees make their services more expensive than those provided by individuals who do not pay such fees.

For example, Airbnb created an online platform that lets owners of homes, apartments and other dwellings lease or rent out their space to others.

This might be done for residences that the owner only occupies part-time or during periods they intend to be away for an extended time. Individual renters might not be able to afford such a residence themselves, but by dividing the costs across multiple renters who occupy the space at separate times, the residence becomes affordable.

Traditional hotels have challenged the legality of Airbnb rentals because those owners typically do not have to adhere to regulatory requirements or pay the associated operating costs.

Sharing economy - Wikipedia

This outcry led to efforts to regulate or crackdown on such rental operations. Comparable legal challenges arose around ride-sharing services such as Uber and Lyft.

Alternatively, collaborative consumption or the sharing economy refers rather to resource circulation systems which allow a consumer two-sided role, in which consumers may act as both providers of resources or obtainers of resources. Start studying Anthropology: Digital Technology, Mass Media, and Consumerism (Notes and Terms). Learn vocabulary, terms, and . Collaborative consumption, such as car sharing, specifically implicates customer-to-customer interaction, which must be regulated by service providers (companies, peers and self-regulating communities), comprising different challenges for business organizations.

The operators of taxi companies and limousine services contended that use of ride-sharing services was an illegal form of competition.

The operations of Uber, for example, were blocked or limited in certain cities where local authorities sought to require the service to adhere to the same regulations that taxi and limousine services abide by.What’s interesting to me but may be old news to some of you is the proliferation of the “collaborative consumption” economy or the “access” economy.

We started with Zipcar and Airbnb and there’s even a venture fund called Collaborative Fund to support ventures that tackle the entrepreneurship of sharing. View Notes - 11 - Collaborative Consumption and the Sharing Economy from MKTG at University of Pennsylvania.

COLLABORATIVE CONSUMPTION AND THE SHARING ECONOMY MKTG / Spring Find Study Resources. Collaborative consumption, such as car sharing, specifically implicates customer-to-customer interaction, which must be regulated by service providers (companies, peers and self-regulating communities), comprising different challenges for business organizations.

Belk () notes that collaborative consumption occupies a middle ground between sharing and marketplace exchange, with elements of both. Regardless of the types of goods and services offered, it seems generally acknowledged that collaborative consumption is concerned with providing access—often on a temporary basis—to .

Recession, wage stagnation, social media, environmental concerns, and the proliferation of smartphones are some of the factors that have helped fuel a rise in collaborative consumption. But is it really the answer to rampant consumerism?

Skip to main content. The Guardian - Back to home. The notion of "collaborative consumption" is not, she notes, new – it has been around.