Rebound Effects of the Sharing Economy
Consumers are increasingly using sharing platforms to share underutilized products. While this is expected to reduce the environmental impact, it is unclear to what degree the use of respective savings or earnings increase resource use.
Factsheet
- Schools involved Business School
- Institute(s) Institute for Innovation and Strategic Entrepreneurship
- Research unit(s) Low-end Innovation
- Funding organisation SNSF
- Duration (planned) 01.12.2019 - 31.12.2022
- Head of project Prof. Dr. Sebastian Gurtner
- Project staff Tin Huynh
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Partner
KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Ecole polytechnique fédérale - Keywords Sharing economy, Sustainability, Collaborative consumption, Innovation, Rebound-Effekt, Motivation
Situation
Actions to minimise rebound effects can be initiated by policy-makers or by the platform providers themselves. To ensure their effectiveness, however, we need to have a better understanding of how human behaviour functions and how it can be changed. Only a small amount of empirically verified knowledge about P2P sharing has been acquired until now.
Course of action
In our project we tackle this problem using an inter- and transdisciplinary approach. First, we analyse the motivations, perceptions and spending activities of the users of peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing platforms. Second, we quantify the extent of the rebound effect and the related environmental impacts resulting from the way in which savings are spent. Finally, together with selected sharing platform providers we will develop and test measures to reduce the environmental impact of sharing practice
