Exploring the practice of collaborative consumption

This paper focuses on peer-to-peer (P2P) exchanges facilitated by online sharing platforms, among actors who cocreate value in a quasi-commercial context. The recent advent of P2P exchange of services through online platforms enables the monetisation of underutilised assets for peer-providers, and more cost-efficient, convenient, and eco-friendly alternatives to traditional modes of consumption for peer-consumers. One example is the digitalisation of the old practice of hitchhiking. Thanks to technological developments over the last 15 years,“hitchhikers 2.0” can find a ride online by using ridesharing platforms such as BlaBlaCar orZimride. The contemporary sharing economy phenomena include various forms of access-based service provision, as well as pseudo-sharing and collaborative consumption practices which allow temporary access to products, for a fee or for free, without transfer of ownership (Bardhi and Eckhardt 2012; Belk 2014; Benoit et al. 2017). Some individuals engage in true sharing practices within closed social circles (e.g. friends and family), while others engage in P2P exchanges with a commercial or even entrepreneurial mindset. For instance, a potential use of collaborative consumption practices is to gain access to new products, brands or places otherwise financially inaccessible (Herbert and Collin-Lachaud 2017). Thus, there seems to be differences in magnitude in collaborative consumption, and not one unique way to participate. In light of practice theory, it is the consumers’ and the organizations’ practices that influencehow P2P and B2C markets are shaped (Kjellberg and Harrison 2007). This study explores the quasi-commercial context of P2P exchanges in order to understand what platform users do when performing a collaborative consumption practice, and to what extent the differences in procedures, understandings, and engagements with the practice by its actors lead to different styles of collaborative consumption. This paper’s main contribution lies in nuancing the conceptualisation of collaborativeconsumption as an alternative mode of consumption. Such nuances in how platform users exchange P2P services build on and contrast previous studies on the access economy, propose a more relevant framework for future studies to depict what aspect of the phenomenon is in focus, and aid characterise collaborative consumption as a form of socio-economic exchange, distinct from B2C access-based services and true sharing. That is, it contributes to the framing of the access economy as not true sharing, but not pure commercial exchanges either