Questions & Answers
What Is the Sharing Economy?
Arun Sundararajan, professor of Information, Operations, and Management Sciences at New York University Leonard N. Stern School of Business, explains three dimensions that define the sharing economy.
Transcript
What is the sharing economy?
My name is Arun Sundararajan. I am a professor at New York University. What I think of as the sharing economy is something that is very commercial—rooted in marketplaces, rooted in exchange. The second dimension of the sharing economy that seems to reoccur is it enables people to shift away from a model where they have to own something in order to be able to derive value from it and toward a model where you can access something without actually owning it. And the third dimension of the sharing economy has to do with a move away from us getting stuff from companies or institutions and toward us getting stuff from each other, mediated by peer-to-peer markets.