It is not all benefits from Airbnb and room-sharing platforms: the problem and concerns of collaborative consumption and sharing economies

Abstract

Sharing economy is so popular nowadays, it is regarded as a new way to generate evolutionary or even revolutionary business models. Owing to the rapid development of verifying, measuring and storing technologies, such as ICT, IoT, GPS, clouds, 5G and block chains, sharing economies have shown its potential in almost all fields: bikes, cars, rooms, logistics, energies, even finance and investments. Explicitly, these technologies seemed to be the solutions of resource indivisibility and free-rider effects, therefore sharing become applicable. Nevertheless, this research believes that sharing is not merely the problem of identifying and delineated the rights and obligations between sharing users. In other words, not all resources are suitable for sharing, especially the stakeholders of the subjects were multiple parties. This research focuses on the concerns of Airbnb-liked room-sharing platforms, collecting opinions from users, providers and the managerial authorities. The results show that sharing is indeed not all about benefits, but comes with all sorts of concerns, ranging from planning issues, devaluing the property value, privacy concerns, to personal safety worries. Another matter is the slow legislation process cannot cope with the rapidly evolving operational patterns in sharing economies. The managerial authorities even could not identify the essence of the problem in sharing to determine the legality of the business. This research suggests that regulating these sharing goods should go back to the fundamental characteristics and not all traditional or old fashion system should be contempt.