Learning from Failures in the Sharing Economy

Fueled by the popularity of firms such as Airbnb and Uber, the sharing economy, otherwise referred to as the collaborative economy or peer economy, has recently gained increasing attention among practitioners and academics. In the sharing economy,3 new ventures develop and deploy digital platforms to enable peer-to-peer sharing of goods, services and information. The underlying proposition of sharing economy firms is that they can add value by allowing owners of resources to make their idle personal assets (e.g., rooms or homes) available to those who need them (e.g., travelers).4 As such, sharing economy firms are direct alternatives to established businesses (e.g., hotels). The resource optimization offered by these firms has become possible through recent technological advances in search, rating and matching algorithms, the spread of mobile consumer devices and the explosive growth in the use of