Download This PaperOperations Management in the Age of the Sharing Economy: What Is Old and What Is New?
Forthcoming, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management
18 Pages Posted: 17 May 2019
Date Written: April 17, 2019
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/models and theory/models that have been used to study sharing economy applications. We do so to put in context some of the recent work on sharing economy, and to showcase the underlying modeling toolkit and identify opportunities for future research.
Keywords: sharing economy, matching markets, peer-to-peer resource sharing, on-demand service platforms, on-demand rental networks, dynamic matching, dynamic pricing
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Ming Hu
University of Toronto - Rotman School of Management ( email )
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