Banned from the Sharing Economy An Agent-based Model of the Peer-to-Peer Distribution of Consumer Goods

The emergence of profit-based online platforms for the peer-to-peer sharing of consumer goods provides new means for the end users to derive profit from their possessions. The success of these platforms relies heavily on the behavior of their participants. Using an agent-based model simulating these behaviors via different scenarios, we show how these mechanisms are efficient to improve the information held by the participants. Analyzing the outcomes of these scenarios as the payoffs of a coordination game, we find contrasting results regarding the benefits obtained by each side of the platform: exclusion of some categories of customers, overpricing of some categories of goods, or under-activity on both sides.