Sharing Economy – a term often has been mentioned during the last decade. Its importance and rapid rise results from ongoing technological progress. Several ideas and visions were turned into business and people are able to share their private apartments, cars and even their food. All this is enabled and coordinated via Internet. In 2013, ‘Shareconomy’ has been the main theme of CeBIT, the world’s largest trade fair for information technology taking place in Germany. That emphasizes once again the impact of information management & technolgy within our society and economic system. Due to proceeding digitalization the boundaries between producers and consumers are becoming increasingly blurred.
What I would like to elaborate in this paper is the role of information management and digitalization with regard to sharing economy. The object is not an evaluation whether sharing economy is good or bad but rather its influence to our society and economic system in general.
The paper is organized in the following manner. A first step will be to define the terms ‘Sharing Economy’, ‘Information Management’ as well as ‘Digitalization’ to create a common understanding of what is being discussed in this paper. Second, the rapid rise of sharing economy that has been observed in recent years will be analyzed. In connection with this, I will put different examples where people are using this principle on record. Based on this, the significance and relation of digitalization and information management is being examined.
Finally, I comment on social and economical implications.
The structure of your paper is very clear and I really like your topic. I have only one little thing, you could think about. I am not sure but it seems to me that the general topic of sharing economy is very big. Maybe it would be easier to pick out just one example of the sharing economy (e.g. car sharing) and focus on that. Then you could point out the significance and relation of digitalization and information management as well as social and economic implications based on car sharing.
First of all your synopsis is well written and clearly structured. So the reader can follow your idea about the topic. First you introduce your issue to the reader and you show what to expect through your structured overview. Still I would recommend to include in your paper a brief example like one from the ones you mentioned in the beginning to make it more vivid. In the end I missed some references, as where your information data comes from. With your CeBIT- example you showed the relevance of it nowadays, which is very good and therefor an interesting field to explore.
Interesting topic; the sharing economy opens a lot of new possibilities. When you are going to analyse the sharing economy I would suggest you make a difference between the commercial and non-commercial part; they have things in common but also a lot of differences. Interesting about the non-commercial part could be a section about free rider problem. See for example Vishnumurthy et al. about their solution to this problem.
Vishnumurthy, V., Chandrakumar, S., & Sirer, E. G. (2003, June). Karma: A secure economic framework for peer-to-peer resource sharing. In Workshop on Economics of Peer-to-Peer Systems (Vol. 35).
When you choose your examples, make sure they are diverse and well argued. For example, you can first generally describe some key aspects of ‘shareconomic’ activities and then come up with examples that cover most different types of ‘shareconomic’ activities you have identified.
In your section about the role of information management and digitization on the shareconomy, maybe also compare the influence of information management on shareconomy to the influence it has on the ‘regular’ economy. This might help to clearly highlight the different aspects of the ‘shareconomy’ compared to the ‘regular’ economy.
Good luck with writing your draft and final paper!
Arthur Verkerke
Your synopsis is very clear structured and as Sophie already mentioned the reader can easily follow your topic!
I have also one thing to add: maybe you could also include a juridical part in your paper. For example, when you buy a car it is your own property! But when you share it with someone and this one has an accident who will have the responsibility to pay for the damage? The “owner” of the car or the driver? How will for example the insurance company deal with that? I think there might be some problems with the insurance company, because they might claim that they won`t pay for the damage, because not the owner of the car had an accident, but someone else instead. So, maybe you could consider this part in your paper as well
Good. Do not write too extensive definitions (they can be thorough and informed though), but make sure that you are quite explicit about what you mean by digitisation and information management in this particular case. In some sense, IM can be seen even as an opposite of sharing if management is considered to imply that there is a manager (it does not need to be so).