Operations Management in the Age of the Sharing Economy: What Is Old and What Is New?

Abstract

The sharing economy, a term we use to refer to business models built around on-demand access to products and services mediated by online platforms that match many small suppliers or service providers to many small buyers, has emerged as an important area of study in operations management. We first describe three “canonical” applications that have garnered much attention from the operations management community. We use these applications to highlight distinguishing features of sharing economy business models and to point out research questions that are new. Then we draw connections between classical operations management theory and models and those that have been used to study sharing economy applications. We do so to put in context some of the recent work on the sharing economy and to showcase the underlying modeling toolkit and identify opportunities for future research.