Introduction to the Special Issue on Sharing Economy and Innovative Marketplaces

Abstract

The last decade has seen rapid growth in business models built around digital platforms that bring together buyers and sellers to interact and trade in new and innovative ways. This growth has been fueled by pervasive internet and increased access to smart, connected, and mobile devices. Some of these platforms have been successful in overcoming the inefficiencies of peer-to-peer interactions by reducing transaction and search costs, facilitating payments, reducing moral hazard, and enabling trust among strangers. Others have been successful in reducing the costs of providing services on demand by harnessing economies of scale, tapping into idle assets, or leveraging the crowd. This has also led to the adoption of business models of products as services built around selling a product’s functionality instead of the product itself. These business models have ushered in new forms of economic interactions that have been alternatively referred to as the “sharing economy,” “on-demand economy,” and “platform economy.” In all cases, these new forms of economic interactions are moving economic activity away from traditional firms to innovative marketplaces where the buyers and sellers of products and services aremany and engage inmany small transactions. This special issue features emerging research in operations management (OM) that is beginning to study these new forms of economic activity, the associated business models, and the underlying operational processes. For the OM community to be at the forefront of the study of this new economy is perhaps natural, given that the central challenge for these innovative marketplaces is one involving the efficient matching of supply and demand. It has been exciting to see the rapid growth in research in this area over the last five years and the growing consensus that this area will be core to the development of OM research in the future. The call for papers for this special issue was announced in August 2017. We received 73 submissions. Ten of those papers were accepted in time to be included in this special issue, with four more still in the review process and may be published in a future regular issue. The papers included in this issue cover a lot of ground and illustrate the wide range of applications, research questions, and research methodologies being deployed, including papers grounded in analytical modeling, empirical evidence, and laboratory experiments. Below, we briefly comment on each of the papers.