The current sharing economy suffers from system-wide deficiencies even as it produces distinctive benefits and advantages for some participants. The first generation of sharing markets has left us to question: Will there be any workers in the sharing economy? Can we know enough about these technologies to regulate them? Is there any way to avoid the monopolization of assets, information, and wealth? Using convergent, transdisciplinary perspectives, this volume examines the challenge of reengineering a sharing economy that is more equitable, democratic, sustainable, and just. The volume enhances the reader’s capacity for integrating applicable findings and theories in business, law and social science into ethical engineering design and practice. At the same time, the book helps explain how technological innovations in the sharing economy create value for different stakeholders and how they impact society at large. Reengineering the Sharing Economy is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This chapter argues that many of the fundamental challenges of sharing economy platforms can best be understood and dealt with by considering these platforms embedded in a sociotechnical ecosystem. This perspective also enables us to formulate many crucial questions about the design, governance, and regulation of sharing economy platforms. The chapter also provides a set of differentiating dimensions that can help with classifying various sharing economy platforms, guide decisions regarding ecosystem boundaries, and shape more relevant sociotechnical questions and hypotheses for a given sharing economy. Finally, the chapter provides a few examples of ecosystem-motivated issues and questions that include a broader consideration of socioeconomic externalities, decisions about modes of platform governance and the relative weight of internal versus external regulations, and public–private partnerships.

The sharing economy is transformative in that it decentralizes services by permitting direct transactions between individuals. A less recognized consequence is that it also decentralizes the geography of services, shifting their distribution away from major business districts and into residential communities. We present a three-part generalized theory for studying and developing policy responses to the arrival of these services in neighborhoods where they were not previously available. First, one must quantify the distribution of the new services across neighborhoods. Second, these geographic shifts in supply and demand can generate positive and negative externalities for communities, which might be hypothesized and tested for empirically. Third, policy responses can be developed based on the knowledge generated by components 1 and 2. We illustrate this proposed theory by examining the incursion of Airbnb short-term rentals into the neighborhoods of Boston, MA for 2010 to 2018. We demonstrate that Airbnb listings quickly grew into neighborhoods away from the downtown core where hotels are concentrated and hypothesize how this might increase investment in local buildings (measured through building permits), activity at local food establishments (measured through the number of new licenses), and crime (measured through 911 reports). We find initial evidence for increased investment through building permits and limited evidence for increased violent crime, but no evidence for increases in food establishments. This can then guide how cities regulate short-term rentals to maximize benefits and minimize negative impacts. We conclude by exploring how the theory might be applied to other forms of the sharing economy.

This chapter provides an overview of five core dimensions that are central to the challenge of optimizing for a just sharing economy: Understanding socioeconomic externalities; pursuing resilience; charting more just and systems-oriented business directions; defining the future of work; and prioritizing access and equity. It highlights the multiple ways in which the analyses throughout the book intersect with these dimensions and argues that each of these dimensions conveys significant information about the values that must be prioritized in the next generation of sharing economy platforms. Finally, the chapter discusses a set of key questions that remain for future research and exploration.