The Definitions of Sharing Economy: A Systematic Literature Review

Nowadays sharing economy phenomenon is a popular topic among companies and academic researchers too. People share their intangible assets and underutilized tangible assets for money or for free with the help of the Internet which results in a new business model and creates a unique research area. The most popular expressions for this phenomenon are sharing economy and collaborative consumption; however, there are much more other definitions which refer to this. In order to new companies can enter and stabilize position on the market, they tend to use ‘sharing economy’ for their operation regardless of their business model which may mislead the customers. There is no clear agreement which is the only one definition that describes the sharing economy in the best way; there is a gap in the literature. For this reason, the purpose of this paper is to analyse the various expressions and make a clear difference between them. To achieve this goal, a systematic literature review has been carried out. According to the literature, 14 core definitions can be identified closely to sharing economy which means more or less the same; but not exactly the same. The result of this study shows how these are connected to each other and how their borders can be defined.