Deconstructing the Sharing Economy: On the relevance for IS research

In the past few years, Sharing Economy (SE) has become increasingly popular mainly for consumer research. Past research focused on describing the phenomenon itself and its disrupting influences on current economic mechanisms. However, information systems (IS) research and scientific literature in general still lack a common understanding of SE and its underlying mechanisms. We therefore elaborate on this gap by conducting a literature review among contributions within IS scholarship that address SE in order to identify to what extent past IS research has covered the topic yet. We aimed to highlight interrelations to adjacent topics and illustrate potential research gaps. As a result, we identified the four perspectives on how the topic is addressed, namely business model, sharing service, sharing asset and exogenous influences. Furthermore, we identified the four principles of SE, which are multi-sided markets, crowdsourcing, trust and recommendation and consumption-based pricing. With this contribution, we aim to guide further investigation of the topic. Additionally, we aim to highlight potential research gaps, as we claim SE to become much more relevant for IS in near future.