The social welfare effects of online sharing platforms

The rapid rise of these online platforms has caused an important change of the consumer markets over the last couple of years. In this master thesis I introduce an analytical model to analyse the social welfare effects of online sharing platforms. I developed an analytical model to formulate a social welfare function of the sharing economy, especially the C2C sharing of durable goods. The results demonstrate that an increase of sharing has a positive effect on social welfare, whereas a increase of goods sold by the producer has a negative impact on social welfare. Further certain actions (e.g. increasing sharing price and platform fees), which prevent sharing, are negative for social welfare. As my model shows that a C2C sharing economy increases social welfare, the policy maker should support the sharing economy.from Sebastian Gruber, BScUniversity of Innsbruck, Masterarbeit, 2019(VLID)329094