Questions & Answers
Can Peer-to-Peer Work for B2B?
Arun Sundararajan, professor of Information, Operations, and Management Sciences at New York University Leonard N. Stern School of Business, says outsourcing is already one form of peer-to-peer for business-to-business activity.
Transcript
Can peer-to-peer work for B2B?
There is a lot of this kind of activity already in the business-to-business community. A vast majority of manufacturing of different things are outsourced to specialists who are using shared capacity to fulfill the manufacturing needs of a wide variety of companies. I think the opportunities arise, for example, in like the federal government has a wide variety of automobiles and other vehicles that may be underutilized. They could set up a sharing economy–like marketplace, to increase the efficiency with which they use those assets. Funding Circle, which is a peer-to-peer loan marketplace. A significant fraction of the customers there are small businesses who are looking for a loan. So, there already is a significant amount of business participation in the peer-to-peer economy, but I think that there is room for growth in the small business sector.