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The Sharing EconomyJuliet B. Schor and Mehmet CansoyWhat came to be called the sharing economy emerged on the U.S. scene in 2008. Originally termed “collaborative consumption” ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"AkTNXLIL","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Botsman and Rogers 2010)","plainCitation":"(Botsman and Rogers 2010)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"abstract":"\"An idea-fueled book that explores the rise of new economic models based on shared resources and collective consumption--and the first articulation of a major socioeconomic phenomenon\"--","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Botsman","given":"Rachel","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Rogers","given":"Roo","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"edition":"1st ed..","id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["2010"]]},"note":"Includes bibliographical references and index.","publisher":"Harper Business","publisher-place":"New York, NY","title":"What's mine is yours : the rise of collaborative consumption","type":"book"}}],"schema":""} (Botsman and Rogers 2010) it was born out of technological possibility and economic necessity. Technological possibility came via platforms and apps that could provide real time information, use algorithms for complex scheduling, facilitate easy payment methods, and importantly, crowd-source ratings and reputational data from large numbers of users. Economic necessity was caused by a crippling recession, which hit young people especially hard.Collaborative consumption is based on the idea that there is considerable excess capacity in the assets held by ordinary households—rooms, cars, and durable goods such as tools or photography equipment. The idea was to create a new market that allows people to rent or freely share those assets to others. While these kinds of transactions were not new, they had been mostly confined to known others or members of ongoing social networks, and were mostly informal. They were also not highly monetized. The hope of platform founders and consultants was that they could transform this informal, thin market into a large and growing one that was based not on existing social ties, but on transactions among strangers. To do so, they touted not only the financial benefits of the monetized versions of collaborative consumption, but a range of supposed social benefits. Sharing rooms on Airbnb was going to reduce the construction of new hotels, thereby reducing environmental impacts. Ridesharing allowed people to make new friends, thereby countering widespread social disconnection. The prevalence of these common good claims helped fuel a robust public debate about the sector. Critics ridiculed the idea that renting rooms or driving for money had anything to do with sharing ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"KwQznrv4","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Hill 2015; Reich 2015)","plainCitation":"(Hill 2015; Reich 2015)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"ISBN":"978-1-250-07158-3","abstract":"\"What's going to happen to my job?\"That's what an increasing number of anxious Americans are asking themselves. The US workforce, which has been one of the most productive and wealthiest in the world, is undergoing an alarming transformation. Increasing numbers of workers find themselves on shaky ground, turned into freelancers, temps and contractors. Even many full-time and professional jobs are experiencing this precarious shift. Within a decade, a near-majority of the 145 million employed Americans will be impacted. Add to that the steamroller of automation, robots and artificial intelligence already replacing millions of workers and projected to \"obsolesce\" millions more, and the jobs picture starts looking grim. Now a weird yet historic mash-up of Silicon Valley technology and Wall Street greed is thrusting upon us the latest economic fraud: the so-called \"sharing economy,\" with companies like Uber, Airbnb and TaskRabbit allegedly \"liberating workers\" to become \"independent\" and \"their own CEOs,\" hiring themselves out for ever-smaller jobs and wages while the companies profit. But this \"share the crumbs\" economy is just the tip of a looming iceberg that the middle class is drifting toward. Raw Deal: How the \"Uber Economy\" and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers,by veteran journalist Steven Hill, is an exposé that challenges conventional thinking, and the hype celebrating this new economy, by showing why the vision of the \"techno sapien\" leaders and their Ayn Rand libertarianism is a dead end. In Raw Deal, Steven Hill proposes pragmatic policy solutions to transform the US economy and its safety net and social contract, launching a new kind of deal to restore power back into the hands of American workers.","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Hill","given":"Steven","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["2015","10"]]},"language":"English","number-of-pages":"336","publisher":"St. Martin's Press","publisher-place":"New York, NY","title":"Raw Deal: How the \"Uber Economy\" and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers","type":"book"}},{"id":778,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":778,"type":"article-newspaper","title":"The Share-the-Scraps Economy","container-title":"Robert Reich","URL":"","author":[{"family":"Reich","given":"Robert B."}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2015",2,2]]},"accessed":{"date-parts":[["2016",3,13]]}}}],"schema":""} (Hill 2015; Reich 2015). Labor advocates derided platforms for exploiting the people doing the work ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"Qn8K4S2y","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Scholz 2016)","plainCitation":"(Scholz 2016)","dontUpdate":true},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"abstract":""This book is about the rise of digital labor. Companies like Uber and Amazon Mechanical Turk promise autonomy, choice, and flexibility. One of network culture's toughest critics, Trebor Scholz chronicles the work of workers in the "sharing economy," and the free labor on sites like Facebook, to take these myths apart. In this rich, accessible, and provocative book, Scholz exposes the uncaring reality of contingent digital work, which is thriving at the expense of employment and worker rights. The book is meant to inspire readers to join the growing number of worker-owned "platform cooperatives," rethink unions, and build a better future of work. A call to action, loud and clear, [this book] shows that it is time to stop wage theft and "crowd fleecing," rethink wealth distribution, and address the urgent question of how digital labor should be regulated and how workers from Berlin, Barcelona, Seattle, and Sa??o Paulo can act in solidarity to defend their rights."--.","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Scholz","given":"Trebor","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["2017"]]},"note":"Includes bibliographical references (pages [194]-225) and index.","publisher":"Polity Press","publisher-place":"Malden, MA","title":"Uberworked and underpaid : how workers are disrupting the digital economy","type":"book"}}],"schema":""} (Scholz 2017). Housing activists responded to reductions in the supply of rental housing and the transformation of neighborhoods into Airbnb enclaves ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"DL3h1kKH","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Slee 2015)","plainCitation":"(Slee 2015)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"ISBN":"978-1-68219-022-7","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Slee","given":"Tom","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["2015"]]},"language":"Swedish","publisher":"OR Books","publisher-place":"New York","title":"What's yours is mine: Against the sharing economy","type":"book"}}],"schema":""} (Slee 2015). Consumer advocates worried about safety, discrimination and accessibility. The business and popular press published numerous stories about the sector, from ebullient predictions that it would eventually “disrupt” everything, to lurid tales of exchanges gone wrong. Proponents and critics predicted pervasive “Uberification.” Controversy continues, largely in the regulatory realm, as cities and states have begun to address lodging and transport issues. Labor groups and community activists have squared off against the companies and their supportive users, resulting in ongoing contentious politics. However, throughout the controversy, the role of consumers in the sharing economy has been far less fraught. They have mainly responded with enthusiasm and appreciation for these new services. While collaborative consumption (durable goods sharing) is the discursive core of the sector, the term “sharing economy” came to denote a larger set of activities, including goods exchange, labor services, and efforts to build social connection. Although the for-profit platforms have gotten the bulk of public attention, the Great Recession also spurred the creation of many not-for-profit, community-based economic initiatives that embraced the term “sharing economy.” These include neighborhood goods sharing platforms, gifting sites, makerspaces, food swaps, time banks, repair collectives, freestores, foodwaste apps, and many other innovations using technology for the common good. Of course, many of these initiatives pre-dated the recession, but the term “sharing economy” came into use in its aftermath.Relatively quickly, the sharing economy became a global phenomenon. In part this was because the two biggest platforms—Airbnb and Uber—expanded internationally, Airbnb by 2009 and Uber in 2011. Competitors sprung up around the world, especially in the transportation sector. But globalization was not merely a big company phenomenon. The concept of sharing also sparked the imagination of city officials and planners, local entrepreneurs, and community activists. Seoul branded itself a “sharing city.” Amsterdam embraced sharing as well. The result has been that both global platforms and both local variations are flourishing. In this chapter we focus on the U.S., as that is the location for our research. However, a number of the findings we report on with respect to consumers and providers are also relevant in other countries. Major areas of difference between the U.S. and other nations’ sharing sectors seem to be in regulation and government policy and the relative importance of non-profit, or solidaristic sharing, especially in Europe. For example, a recent study of commons and sharing initiatives in the Belgian city of Ghent (300,000 population) found 500 separate projects in operation ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"OqbCmg4E","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Bauwens and Onzia 2017)","plainCitation":"(Bauwens and Onzia 2017)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2736,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2736,"type":"article-newspaper","title":"A Commons Transition Plan for the City of Ghent","container-title":"Commons Transition","URL":"","author":[{"family":"Bauwens","given":"Michael"},{"family":"Onzia","given":"Yurek"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2017",9,8]]},"accessed":{"date-parts":[["2019",3,17]]}}}],"schema":""} (Bauwens and Onzia 2017).We have been studying the “sharing economy” since 2011, as part of a MacArthur Foundation project. Our research team is comprised of eight PhD students or recent graduates in sociology. We have studied eleven sharing economy cases. We began with four non-profits—a timebank, a food swap, a makerspace, and open educational resources. In 2013 we turned to for-profit platforms, where our cases have been Airbnb, RelayRides (now rebranded as Turo), TaskRabbit, Uber, Lyft, Postmates and Favor. Our final case is Stocksy, a provider cooperative for stock photographers. Our research has largely been qualitative—in the non-profit cases we did participant observation and in-depth interviews. In the for-profits we did interviews, and in the case of Airbnb, we collected a database of hundreds of thousands of listings which we are analyzing. We currently have more than 350 interviews with sharing economy participants, including members of sites, consumers, and people who are earning on the platforms (ie., providers). To obtain interviews we used a variety of sampling approaches, attempting random recruitment whenever possible. In the pages to follow, references to “our research” will be this body of data.Because the sharing economy is a new and rapidly evolving sector, there is a limited body of literature to draw on. Furthermore, today’s findings may not be a good guide to the future. But there is enough work that has been done to report on various aspects of this new market. First, we turn to a discussion of definitions and terminology. We then discuss research on participants’ experiences in the sector, as well as critics’ views and how they relate to larger trends in consumer culture. We then turn to research in a few specific areas: inequality and discrimination, as well as the conflicts over regulation of the two biggest platforms: Airbnb and Uber. We conclude with some thoughts about the future of the sharing economy.Definitions and scope: what is the sharing economy?The term “collaborative consumption” came into use via the efforts of a management consultant named Rachel Botsman. However, by 2010, the preferred term had become the “sharing economy.” While some contend its earliest use is unknown, others claim it originates from Lawrence Lessig’s Remix ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"XhSfobQM","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Lessig 2008)","plainCitation":"(Lessig 2008)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"ISBN":"1594201722","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Lessig","given":"Lawrence","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["2008"]]},"publisher":"Penguin","title":"Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy","type":"book"}}],"schema":""} (Lessig 2008). This attribution suggests a connection to the history of collaborative online activity. Aspects of the sharing economy were already well established, such as crowd-sourcing of ratings and reputational data on sites like eBay, Trip Advisor and Yelp, as well as sharing of files and other content. The phenomenon of “collaboration” had been thriving for some time in the open source software movement ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"rRwfpEEK","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Benkler 2006)","plainCitation":"(Benkler 2006)"},"citationItems":[{"id":674,"uris":["",""],"uri":["",""],"itemData":{"id":674,"type":"book","title":"The wealth of networks: how social production transforms markets and freedom","publisher":"Yale Univ. Press","publisher-place":"New Haven, Conn.","number-of-pages":"515","source":"Gemeinsamer Bibliotheksverbund ISBN","event-place":"New Haven, Conn.","ISBN":"978-0-300-12577-1","shortTitle":"The wealth of networks","language":"eng","author":[{"family":"Benkler","given":"Yochai"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2006"]]}}}],"schema":""} (Benkler 2006), citizen science and distributed computing ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"vECyKAmX","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Benkler 2004)","plainCitation":"(Benkler 2004)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"DOI":"10.2307/4135731","ISBN":"0044-0094","ISSN":"00440094","abstract":"The article focuses on social sharing and exchange which is becoming a common modality of producing valuable desiderata at the very core of the most advanced economies-in information, culture, education, computation, and communications sectors. Free software, distributed computing, ad hoc mesh wireless networks, and other forms of peer production offer clear examples of such large-scale, measurably effective sharing practices. The author suggests that the highly distributed capital structure of contemporary communications and computation systems is largely responsible for the increased salience of social sharing as a modality of economic production in those environments. By lowering the capital costs required for effective individual action, these technologies have allowed various provisioning problems to be structured in forms amenable to decentralized production based on social relations, rather than through markets or hierarchies. People live in a unique moment of humanistic sharing. It is, rather, that the moment in history suggests a more general observation: that the technological state of a society, particularly the extent to which individual agents can engage in efficacious production activities with material resources under their individual control, affects the opportunities for, and hence the comparative prevalence and salience of, social, market and state production modalities. The capital cost of effective economic action in the industrial economy shunted sharing to its peripheries-to households in the advanced economies, and to the global economic peripheries that have been the subject of the anthropology of gift or common property regime literatures.","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Benkler","given":"Yochai","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Yale Law Journal","id":"ITEM-1","issue":"2","issued":{"date-parts":[["2004"]]},"page":"273-358","title":"Sharing nicely: On shareable goods and the emergence of sharing as a modality of economic production","type":"article-journal","volume":"114"}}],"schema":""} (Benkler 2004). We mention this because the connection to these earlier digital activities suggests a different history than popular origin stories, for example Brian Chesky of Airbnb’s decision to rent out his air mattress during a space crunch in San Francisco. Linking the sharing sector to earlier cyber-utopian ideas and communities de-centers the role of venture capital and acknowledges the aspirational beginnings of some platforms, as well as the not-for-profit portion of the sector. Many participants online peer-to-peer communities believed they would be democratizing, empowering, and perhaps even an alternative to market capitalism ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"ovCrY8OS","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Benkler 2006)","plainCitation":"(Benkler 2006)"},"citationItems":[{"id":674,"uris":["",""],"uri":["",""],"itemData":{"id":674,"type":"book","title":"The wealth of networks: how social production transforms markets and freedom","publisher":"Yale Univ. Press","publisher-place":"New Haven, Conn.","number-of-pages":"515","source":"Gemeinsamer Bibliotheksverbund ISBN","event-place":"New Haven, Conn.","ISBN":"978-0-300-12577-1","shortTitle":"The wealth of networks","language":"eng","author":[{"family":"Benkler","given":"Yochai"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2006"]]}}}],"schema":""} (Benkler 2006). Similar ideas have also animated many in the sharing sector. Many identify the core of the sharing economy as the use of idle assets ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"3gevncmV","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Frenken and Schor 2017)","plainCitation":"(Frenken and Schor 2017)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"DOI":"10.1016/j.eist.2017.01.003","ISSN":"22104224","abstract":"We develop a conceptual framework that allows us to define the sharing economy and its close cousins and we understand its sudden rise from an economic-historic perspective. We then assess the sharing economy platforms in terms of the economic, social and environmental impacts. We end with reflections on current regulations and future alternatives, and suggest a number of future research questions.","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Frenken","given":"Koen","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Schor","given":"Juliet","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions","id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["2017"]]},"page":"3-10","publisher":"Elsevier B.V.","title":"Putting the sharing economy into perspective","type":"article-journal","volume":"23"}}],"schema":""} (Frenken and Schor 2017). Airbnb is the classic example, but in the early days of UberX and Lyft the idea was that people with a car and spare time could put those “idle” resources to use as well, and some research claims ridehailing drivers are more efficient than conventional taxis ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"T9Nz1b9H","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Cramer and Krueger 2016)","plainCitation":"(Cramer and Krueger 2016)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"DOI":"10.1257/aer.p20161002","ISBN":"9781783471270","ISSN":"00028282","PMID":"502955140","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Cramer","given":"Judd","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Krueger","given":"Alan B","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"American Economic Review: Papers & Proceedings","id":"ITEM-1","issue":"5","issued":{"date-parts":[["2016"]]},"page":"177-182","title":"Disruptive Change in the Taxi Business: The Case of Uber","type":"article-journal","volume":"106"}}],"schema":""} (Cramer and Krueger 2016). There were also a number of platforms that promoted non-monetized exchanges, such as loaning and gifting. Prominent examples include Yerdle (goods loaning), Landshare (pairing would-be gardeners with landholders), and Neighborgoods and ShareSomeSugar (neighborhood-based loaning sites). While Airbnb, Uber and Lyft scaled rapidly, none of the four just mentioned are still operating. The sharing economy also came to cover platforms that specialized in “gig labor,” such as generalized task and errands sites (TaskRabbit, Zaarly, Takl), specialized task sites (DogVacay), and delivery services (Deliveroo, Favor, Postmates). Some observers also included sites that were attempting to establish second-hand markets as part of the sharing economy. This category, which in recent decades had been low-value, localized, and under-developed, was boosted by crowd-sourced ratings and reputational data (eBay) and convenience (CraigsList). Here there were also for-profit and non-profit offerings, including freecycle, ThredUp (the Netflix of apparel, a for-profit) and Swapstyle (apparel exchange). In practice, the terminology has been analytically incoherent. One reason, pointed out by critics, is that many of these sites, such as ride-hailing or gig labor apps, developed in ways that left them with few or no true sharing features. Russell Belk ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"w3XCoNT8","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(2014)","plainCitation":"(2014)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"DOI":"10.13140/RG.2.1.1630.3842","ISBN":"09720073","ISSN":"09720073","abstract":"The Internet has opened up a new era in sharing. There has also been an explosion of studies and writings about sharing via the Internet. This includes a series of books, articles, and web discussions on the topic. However, many of these apparent cases of sharing are better characterized as pseudo-sharing-commodity exchanges wrapped in a vocabulary of sharing. The present paper reviews subsequent research and theorizing as well as controversies that have emerged surrounding sharing and what is best regarded as pseudo-sharing-a wolf-in-sheep's-clothing phenomenon whereby commodity exchange and potential exploitation of consumer co-creators present themselves in the guise of sharing. The paper begins with a pair of vignettes that highlight some of the contested meanings of sharing. By detailing four types of pseudo-sharing and four types of sharing that are specifically enabled or enhanced by Internet technologies, the paper argues that pseudo-sharing is distinguished by the presence of profit motives, the absence of feelings of community, and expectations of reciprocity. It concludes with a discussion of theoretical, practical, and ethical implications of pseudo-sharing and offer suggestions for future research. ? Kamla-Raj 2014.","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Belk","given":"Russell","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Anthropologist","id":"ITEM-1","issue":"1","issued":{"date-parts":[["2014"]]},"page":"7-23","title":"Sharing versus pseudo-sharing in web 2.0","type":"article-journal","volume":"18"},"suppress-author":true}],"schema":""} (2014) has claimed that sharing cannot include exchange of money, however, this position has been persuasively criticized ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"XHPDbPXh","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(2015)","plainCitation":"(2015)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"DOI":"10.1177/1470593115572669","ISSN":"1470-5931, 1741-301X","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Arnould","given":"E. J.","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Rose","given":"A. S.","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Marketing Theory","id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["2015","3"]]},"language":"en","title":"Mutuality: Critique and substitute for Belk's \"sharing\"","type":"article-journal"},"suppress-author":true}],"schema":""} (2015). The weaknesses of the “sharing cannot include money” perspective is also evident from work in economics and sociology, on the complexity of motives ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"2ot2dd9mla","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Zelizer, 1997)","plainCitation":"(Zelizer, 1997)","dontUpdate":true},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"ISBN":"978-0-691-04821-5","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Zelizer","given":"Viviana A. Rotman","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["1997"]]},"number-of-pages":"286","publisher":"Princeton University Press","publisher-place":"Princeton, N.J","title":"The social meaning of money","type":"book"}}],"schema":""} (Zelizer 1997). Belk and others reproduce popular tropes, adopting what Zelizer ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"fw5CAWnt","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(2005)","plainCitation":"(2005)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"xfSdPSKt/Wb5NFrWc","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"ISBN":"978-0-691-13063-7","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Zelizer","given":"Viviana A. Rotman","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"id":"xfSdPSKt/Wb5NFrWc","issued":{"year":2005},"language":"eng","number-of-pages":"356","publisher":"Princeton Univ. Press","publisher-place":"Princeton, N.J.","title":"The purchase of intimacy","type":"book"},"suppress-author":true}],"schema":""} (2005) has termed the “hostile worlds” perspective. As John ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"EQgJ3AKq","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(2016)","plainCitation":"(2016)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2534,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2534,"type":"book","title":"The Age of Sharing","publisher":"Polity","publisher-place":"Cambridge","event-place":"Cambridge","note":"00000","author":[{"family":"John","given":"Nicholas A."}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2016"]]}},"suppress-author":true}],"schema":""} (2016) has noted, sharing is a polysemic term that covers multiple practices. We have found that participants on some platforms do use the terminology of sharing to describe their activities ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"aY0xOeTa","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Fitzmaurice et al. 2018)","plainCitation":"(Fitzmaurice et al. 2018)"},"citationItems":[{"id":1083,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":1083,"type":"article-journal","title":"Domesticating the Market: Moral exchange and the sharing economy","container-title":"Socio-Economic Review","volume":"mwy003","note":"00000","author":[{"family":"Fitzmaurice","given":"Connor"},{"family":"Ladegaard","given":"Isak"},{"family":"Attwood-Charles","given":"Will"},{"family":"Cansoy","given":"Mehmet"},{"family":"Carfagna","given":"Lindsey B."},{"family":"Schor","given":"Juliet B."},{"family":"Wengronowitz","given":"Robert"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2018"]]}}}],"schema":""} (Fitzmaurice et al. 2018), however Ravenelle ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"Sfnp5o3C","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(2017)","plainCitation":"(2017)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"xfSdPSKt/6UEe3Lf6","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Ravenelle","given":"Alexandrea J","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society","id":"xfSdPSKt/6UEe3Lf6","issued":{"year":2017},"title":"Sharing economy workers: selling, not sharing","type":"article-journal","volume":"rsw043","container-title-short":"Camb. J. Reg. Econ. Soc."},"suppress-author":true}],"schema":""} (2017), who studied providers in New York City, finds that those who lack substantial assets, such as Uber drivers and TaskRabbits, reject that usage. She terms the sector “rational capitalism.” Another terminological issue is that very similar platforms are treated differently. Uber has never considered itself part of the “sharing economy” but Lyft, a nearly identical platform, has. Some gig labor platforms (TaskRabbit) are in; while Amazon’s MechanicalTurk is not. In large part, platforms have self-selected into or out of the “sharing” sector ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"sTcREFTY","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Schor 2014)","plainCitation":"(Schor 2014)"},"citationItems":[{"id":1208,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":1208,"type":"report","title":"Debating the Sharing Economy","publisher":"Tellus Institute","source":"Google Scholar","URL":"","number":"Great Transition Initiative","author":[{"family":"Schor","given":"Juliet B."}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2014",10]]},"accessed":{"date-parts":[["2015",9,17]]}}}],"schema":""} (Schor 2014). As Richardson ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"hu3HdFTq","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(2015)","plainCitation":"(2015)","dontUpdate":true},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"DOI":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.11.004","ISSN":"0016-7185","abstract":"The sharing economy converges around activities facilitated through digital platforms that enable peer-to-peer access to goods and services. It constitutes an apparent paradox, framed as both part of the capitalist economy and as an alternative. This duplicity necessitates focusing on the performances of the sharing economy: how it simultaneously constructs diverse economic activities whilst also inviting the deconstruction of ongoing practices of dominance. Such performances hold open the question of what the (sharing) economy is, suspending it as a space for both opportunity and critique. Drawing on participant observation at a sharing economy ‘festival’ and analysis of the vocabularies of online platforms, the paper outlines three performances of sharing through community, access and collaboration. It argues through these performances that the sharing economy is contingent and complexly articulated. It has the potential to both shake up and further entrench ‘business-as-usual’ through the ongoing reconfiguration of a divergent range of (economic) activities. Whilst offering an antidote to the narrative of economy as engendering isolation and separation, the sharing economy simultaneously masks new forms of inequality and polarisations of ownership. Nonetheless, the paper concludes in suggesting that by pointing to wider questions concerning participation in, access to and production of resources, the sharing economy should not be dismissed. Instead, it should serve as prompt to engage with ‘digital’ transformations of economy in the spirit of affirmative critique that might enact the promise of doing economy differently.","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Richardson","given":"Lizzie","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Geoforum","id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["2015","12"]]},"page":"121-129","title":"Performing the sharing economy","type":"article-journal","volume":"67"}}],"schema":""} (Richardson 2015) has argued, the term has become performative. Demographics Who is active in the sharing economy? Overall, usage has been structured by age and cultural capital, as well as geography. The sharing economy began in urban areas and remains disproportionately urban. Furthermore, participants are young and highly educated. Although hard numbers are difficult to obtain because surveys have been sporadic and sample sizes small, there is widespread agreement that college students, recent graduates and the under-35 age group made up the bulk of early participants. Even as the sector mainstreamed, its makeup remained disproportionately young and highly educated, on both the consumer and the provider sides. A 2016 national survey by the Pew organization found that 18-29 year olds are more likely to be consumers of ridehailing, clothing rental, and co-working spaces than older age groups. The 29-44 age group is more represented in lodging (likely because of cost). The youngest age group are also heavily represented as buyers of second hand or handmade goods and consumers of gig labor for household tasks. Among 18-29 year olds, 15% had used ridehailing services, 11% homesharing, 4% coworking and task labor and 2% had rented clothing from platforms. Overall, usage begins to drop off significantly after age 45 ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"ysGrezSS","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Pew Research Center 2016b)","plainCitation":"(Pew Research Center 2016b)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2692,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2692,"type":"report","title":"Shared, Collaborative and On Demand: The New Digital Economy","URL":"","author":[{"literal":"Pew Research Center"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2016"]]}}}],"schema":""} (Pew Research Center 2016b). A 2015 survey found that 34% of U.S. residents between the ages of 16 and 34 said they belonged to a sharing service or expected to within the next year ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"UP0B2j1h","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Bloomberg Brief 2015)","plainCitation":"(Bloomberg Brief 2015)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2741,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2741,"type":"article-newspaper","title":"The Sharing Economy: Friend or Foe?","container-title":"","URL":"","author":[{"family":"Bloomberg Brief","given":""}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2015",6,15]]},"accessed":{"date-parts":[["2018",3,17]]}}}],"schema":""} (Bloomberg Brief 2015). The provider side also skews toward youth, with Pew reporting that 18-29 year olds were twice as likely to participate in gig work and task sites than the population as a whole ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"gtTtBtDe","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Pew Research Center 2016a)","plainCitation":"(Pew Research Center 2016a)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2472,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2472,"type":"report","title":"Gig Work, Online Selling and Home Sharing","URL":"","author":[{"literal":"Pew Research Center"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2016"]]},"accessed":{"date-parts":[["2017",2,12]]}}}],"schema":""} (Pew Research Center 2016a). Sharing economy participants are highly educated. The Pew survey found that across many sites, the college educated were more likely to be using services, and nearly half of this group was already users. TaskRabbit reported that 70% of its providers had a college education or more ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"y4iNSEBg","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Newton 2013)","plainCitation":"(Newton 2013)"},"citationItems":[{"id":497,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":497,"type":"article-newspaper","title":"Temping fate: can TaskRabbit go from side gigs to real jobs?","container-title":"The Verge","abstract":"The errand marketplace hires for longer-term work, and may add benefits","URL":"","author":[{"family":"Newton","given":"Casey"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2013",5,23]]}}}],"schema":""} (Newton 2013). Hall and Krueger ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"qRsmid8v","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(2016)","plainCitation":"(2016)"},"citationItems":[{"id":447,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":447,"type":"article-journal","title":"An Analysis of the Labor Market for Uber's Driver-Partners in the United States","container-title":"NBER Working Paper","issue":"22843","URL":"","author":[{"family":"Hall","given":"Jonathan"},{"family":"Krueger","given":"Alan B."}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2016"]]}},"suppress-author":1}],"schema":""} (2016) report from a survey of 601 Uber drivers that 37% have a college degree, and 40% have either an Associate’s Degree or some college. In addition, 11% a have post-graduate degree. These education levels are far in excess of the population as a whole. In our research, we find almost no participants who have less than a high school diploma. Most are college graduates (or in college) and a significant fraction have graduate degrees. The high levels of education in our sample can be partially explained by the fact that most of our respondents were based in Boston, but high education levels are common on most platforms.Participants’ ExperiencesMuch of the public discourse on the sharing economy has focused on the experiences of workers, with widespread criticism of Uber and similar platforms for their low wages and poor treatment of drivers. There has been far less attention paid to to the experiences of participants on other platforms, or either as producers or consumers. In our research, we find that the sharing economy is a productive site for understanding consumer trends, as well as developing theoretical approaches to the sociology of consumption.Users are a high cultural capital (hereafter, HCC) group, with a distinctive, trendsetting habitus. Furthermore, because they are young, most have limited economic capital. This was especially true in the early years, during the Great Recession. Participants looked to platforms to save and earn money and many of our respondents, especially on Airbnb, were both consumers and earners, Furthermore, a number of our non-profit cases require engagement on both sides of the exchange (e.g., food swap, timebank). Thus, the strict demarcation between consumer and producer is not always operative in this sector, although at the low wage end of the gig labor market there is less overlap. While economic motives have been important in attracting users, participants also embraced the “sharing economy” because it offered a chance to enact moral projects and practice a distinctive eco-habitus that had already been emerging in urban areas. ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"bZmrBjIh","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Carfagna et al. 2014)","plainCitation":"(Carfagna et al. 2014)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"DOI":"10.1177/1469540514526227","ISSN":"1469-5405","abstract":"Bourdieu’s concept of habitus describes a set of tastes and dispositions operating according to a class homology – for example, a working-class preference for utility, or a bourgeois orientation toward luxury. In the United States, Holt found that high cultural capital consumers were characterized by their cosmopolitanism, idealism, connoisseurship, and affinity for the exotic and authentic. In this article, we use Holt’s analysis as a comparative case, finding an altered high cultural capital habitus incorporating environmental awareness and sustainability principles, in a configuration that has been called ethical or “conscious consumption.” Using both quantitative survey data of self-described conscious consumers as well as four qualitative case studies, we argue that ethical consumers are overwhelmingly high cultural capital consumers, and that high cultural capital consumption strategies have shifted since Holt’s study in the mid-1990s. We show that on a number of dimensions – cosmopolitanism, idealism, and relation to manual labor – a new high cultural capital consumer repertoire privileges the local, material, and manual, while maintaining a strategy of distinction. While the critical literature on conscious consumers has suggested that such practices reflect neo-liberal tendencies that individualize environmental responsibility, our findings suggest that such practices are hardly individual. Rather, they are collective strategies of consumption – what we have termed an emerging high cultural capital “eco-habitus.” ","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Carfagna","given":"Lindsey B","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Dubois","given":"Emilie a","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Fitzmaurice","given":"Connor","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Ouimette","given":"Monique Y","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Schor","given":"Juliet B","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Willis","given":"Margaret","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Laidley","given":"Thomas","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Journal of Consumer Culture ","id":"ITEM-1","issue":"2 ","issued":{"date-parts":[["2014"]]},"page":"158-178","title":"An emerging eco-habitus: The reconfiguration of high cultural capital practices among ethical consumers","type":"article-journal","volume":"14 "}}],"schema":""} (Carfagna et al. 2014). It is rooted in a shift of young HCC consumers toward a more bodily, material and locally rooted set of practices. It is also highly structured through a particular moral orientation. A key part of this orientation is that across both for-profit platforms and non-profit community sites we have found that participants articulate critiques of corporate capitalism, often for reasons tied to consumption. In some ways, this may not be surprising, as young adults’ attitudes toward capitalism have become rather negative. In 2011, more 18-29 year olds had a negative view of “capitalism” than a positive one (47% to 46%) ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"VQB0WI9j","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Pew Research Center 2011)","plainCitation":"(Pew Research Center 2011)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2739,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2739,"type":"report","title":"Little Change in Public’s Response to ’Capitalism,’ ’Socialism’","URL":"","author":[{"literal":"Pew Research Center"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2011"]]},"accessed":{"date-parts":[["2018",3,17]]}}}],"schema":""} (Pew Research Center 2011). Perhaps more surprisingly, this age group also held a more positive view of “socialism” than “capitalism” (49% to 46%). This shift occurred on the heels of the Great Recession, which represented a massive failure of economic opportunity and fairness, especially for young people. While our respondents do not understand the sharing economy as a “socialist” project, it represents an alternative to corporate capitalism and dominant cultures of consumption ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"4M82x85K","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Fitzmaurice et al. 2018)","plainCitation":"(Fitzmaurice et al. 2018)"},"citationItems":[{"id":1083,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":1083,"type":"article-journal","title":"Domesticating the Market: Moral exchange and the sharing economy","container-title":"Socio-Economic Review","volume":"mwy003","note":"00000","author":[{"family":"Fitzmaurice","given":"Connor"},{"family":"Ladegaard","given":"Isak"},{"family":"Attwood-Charles","given":"Will"},{"family":"Cansoy","given":"Mehmet"},{"family":"Carfagna","given":"Lindsey B."},{"family":"Schor","given":"Juliet B."},{"family":"Wengronowitz","given":"Robert"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2018"]]}}}],"schema":""} (Fitzmaurice et al. 2018). This is especially true for participants in the non-profits and the more remunerative platforms. (It is less true of the lowest-end gig work, such as ridehailing and food delivery.) Respondents consistently disparage impersonal hotel chains, anonymous service encounters, and ecologically-oblivious companies operating at transnational scale. Many shop at thrift stores and farmers’ markets. They prefer to avoid global supply chains, processed foods, and mass produced items. Some even attempt to de-link from commercial markets altogether, opting for lifestyles of bartering, DIY provisioning, and acquisition via gift or secondhand markets. They express relational goals for transactions, and believe that economic activity should foster well-being, via financial and personal autonomy, as well as social connectedness and meaning. They indict corporate life for failing on these terms. In many ways, sharing economy participants’ anti-corporate attitudes seem to align them with the critics of neo-liberalism. Indeed, neoliberal capitalism is a trope they frequently reference as a foil.However, their views of the sharing economy differ from those of most critics of neoliberalism. The latter see the sharing economy as the cutting edge of a rapacious system destroying yet another social realm. By commodifying everyday life, it turns people into neoliberal subjects and crowds out altruistic sharing. Furthermore, the critics see platform sharing as a fraudulent concept, because it involves the pursuit of economic gain, rather than genuine solidarity. Participants are merely “sharing the scraps,” with platforms appropriating the bulk of the value generated ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"stkOqqSG","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Reich 2015)","plainCitation":"(Reich 2015)"},"citationItems":[{"id":778,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":778,"type":"article-newspaper","title":"The Share-the-Scraps Economy","container-title":"Robert Reich","URL":"","author":[{"family":"Reich","given":"Robert B."}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2015",2,2]]},"accessed":{"date-parts":[["2016",3,13]]}}}],"schema":""} (Reich 2015). In the critics’ view, the platforms are creating an even more efficient, ruthless and totalistic system of exploitation in which the ongoing risk shift onto workers is accelerated ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"ZJjLVYUA","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Scholz 2016; Hill 2015b; Slee 2015)","plainCitation":"(Scholz 2016; Hill 2015b; Slee 2015)","dontUpdate":true},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"abstract":""This book is about the rise of digital labor. Companies like Uber and Amazon Mechanical Turk promise autonomy, choice, and flexibility. One of network culture's toughest critics, Trebor Scholz chronicles the work of workers in the "sharing economy," and the free labor on sites like Facebook, to take these myths apart. In this rich, accessible, and provocative book, Scholz exposes the uncaring reality of contingent digital work, which is thriving at the expense of employment and worker rights. The book is meant to inspire readers to join the growing number of worker-owned "platform cooperatives," rethink unions, and build a better future of work. A call to action, loud and clear, [this book] shows that it is time to stop wage theft and "crowd fleecing," rethink wealth distribution, and address the urgent question of how digital labor should be regulated and how workers from Berlin, Barcelona, Seattle, and Sa??o Paulo can act in solidarity to defend their rights."--.","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Scholz","given":"Trebor","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["2017"]]},"note":"Includes bibliographical references (pages [194]-225) and index.","publisher":"Polity Press","publisher-place":"Malden, MA","title":"Uberworked and underpaid : how workers are disrupting the digital economy","type":"book"}},{"id":"ITEM-2","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"ISBN":"978-1-250-07158-3","abstract":"\"What's going to happen to my job?\"That's what an increasing number of anxious Americans are asking themselves. The US workforce, which has been one of the most productive and wealthiest in the world, is undergoing an alarming transformation. Increasing numbers of workers find themselves on shaky ground, turned into freelancers, temps and contractors. Even many full-time and professional jobs are experiencing this precarious shift. Within a decade, a near-majority of the 145 million employed Americans will be impacted. Add to that the steamroller of automation, robots and artificial intelligence already replacing millions of workers and projected to \"obsolesce\" millions more, and the jobs picture starts looking grim. Now a weird yet historic mash-up of Silicon Valley technology and Wall Street greed is thrusting upon us the latest economic fraud: the so-called \"sharing economy,\" with companies like Uber, Airbnb and TaskRabbit allegedly \"liberating workers\" to become \"independent\" and \"their own CEOs,\" hiring themselves out for ever-smaller jobs and wages while the companies profit. But this \"share the crumbs\" economy is just the tip of a looming iceberg that the middle class is drifting toward. Raw Deal: How the \"Uber Economy\" and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers,by veteran journalist Steven Hill, is an exposé that challenges conventional thinking, and the hype celebrating this new economy, by showing why the vision of the \"techno sapien\" leaders and their Ayn Rand libertarianism is a dead end. In Raw Deal, Steven Hill proposes pragmatic policy solutions to transform the US economy and its safety net and social contract, launching a new kind of deal to restore power back into the hands of American workers.","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Hill","given":"Steven","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"id":"ITEM-2","issued":{"date-parts":[["2015","10"]]},"language":"English","number-of-pages":"336","publisher":"St. Martin's Press","publisher-place":"New York, NY","title":"Raw Deal: How the \"Uber Economy\" and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers","type":"book"}},{"id":"ITEM-3","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"ISBN":"978-1-68219-022-7","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Slee","given":"Tom","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"id":"ITEM-3","issued":{"date-parts":[["2015"]]},"language":"Swedish","publisher":"OR Books","publisher-place":"New York","title":"What's yours is mine: Against the sharing economy","type":"book"}}],"schema":""} (Hill 2015; Scholz 2017; Slee 2015). As Evgeny Morozov ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"FPx7SqpA","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(2013)","plainCitation":"(2013)"},"citationItems":[{"id":811,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":811,"type":"article-newspaper","title":"The ‘sharing economy’ undermines workers’ rights","container-title":"Financial Times","source":"Financial Times","abstract":"The “sharing economy” has many fans but Eric Schneiderman, New York State’s attorney-general, is not one of them. He has demanded that Airbnb, a company that allows anyone to rent their property to strangers, hand over records of its 15,000 hosts in","URL":"","author":[{"family":"Morozov","given":"Evgeny"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2013",10,14]]},"accessed":{"date-parts":[["2016",3,12]]}},"suppress-author":true}],"schema":""} (2013) has argued: “The sharing economy amplifies the worst excesses of the dominant economic model: it is neoliberalism on steroids.”Research with actual participants gives a mixed picture. Alexandrea Ravenelle ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"FNa7bffr","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(2016, 2017)","plainCitation":"(2016, 2017)"},"citationItems":[{"id":1148,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":1148,"type":"chapter","title":"A Return to Gemeinschaft: Digital Impression Management and the Sharing Economy","container-title":"Digital Sociologies","publisher":"Policy Press","publisher-place":"Bristol, UK","event-place":"Bristol, UK","note":"00000","author":[{"family":"Ravenelle","given":"Alexandrea J."}],"editor":[{"family":"Daniels","given":"Jessie"},{"family":"Gregory","given":"Karen"},{"family":"McMillan Cottom","given":"Tressie"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2016"]]}},"suppress-author":true},{"id":"xfSdPSKt/6UEe3Lf6","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Ravenelle","given":"Alexandrea J","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society","id":"xfSdPSKt/6UEe3Lf6","issued":{"year":2017},"title":"Sharing economy workers: selling, not sharing","type":"article-journal","volume":"rsw043","container-title-short":"Camb. J. Reg. Econ. Soc."},"suppress-author":true}],"schema":""} (2016, 2017), who interviewed 100 providers on four platforms in New York argues that they are unlikely to consider their activities sharing, and that they are critical of the platforms. By contrast, Germann Molz ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"dunPoL15","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(2013)","plainCitation":"(2013)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"DOI":"10.1016/j.annals.2013.08.001","ISSN":"0160-7383","abstract":"The purpose of this study is to examine the role social networking technologies play in the moral economy of alternative tourism. The study takes as its empirical focus the online hospitality exchange network Couchsurfing. Using the concept of ‘moral affordances’, the analysis outlines the way Couchsurfing’s technical systems, software design, and search algorithms enable participants to engage in a moral economy based on the non-commodified provision of accommodation to strangers and personal relations of trust and intimacy. Findings suggest that these affordances are not isolated effects of the technologies themselves, but rather reflect a broader moral landscape in which alternative tourism is performed.","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Germann Molz","given":"Jennie G","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Annals of Tourism Research","id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["2013","10"]]},"page":"210-230","title":"Social Networking Technologies and the Moral Economy of Alternative Tourism: The Case of ","type":"article-journal","volume":"43"},"suppress-author":true}],"schema":""} (2013) argues that Couchsurfing, a free hospitality platform, functions as a “moral economy” in which participants are highly invested in this ethical form of travel. Ikkala and Lampinen ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"2vznUz76","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(2015)","plainCitation":"(2015)"},"citationItems":[{"id":1056,"uris":["",""],"uri":["",""],"itemData":{"id":1056,"type":"paper-conference","title":"Monetizing Network Hospitality: Hospitality and Sociability in the Context of Airbnb","container-title":"CSCW’15 Proceedings of the ACM 2015 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work","publisher":"ACM","publisher-place":"New York, NY","page":"1033-1044","source":"CrossRef","event-place":"New York, NY","DOI":"10.1145/2675133.2675274","ISBN":"978-1-4503-2922-4","shortTitle":"Monetizing Network Hospitality","language":"en","author":[{"family":"Ikkala","given":"Tapio"},{"family":"Lampinen","given":"Airi"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2015"]]},"accessed":{"date-parts":[["2015",11,21]]}},"suppress-author":1}],"schema":""} (2015) find that hospitality is an important motivator for Airbnb hosts. Ladegaard’s ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"KqzmtUGk","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(2018)","plainCitation":"(2018)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Ladegaard","given":"Isak","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"The Sociological Review","id":"ITEM-1","issue":"2","issued":{"date-parts":[["2018"]]},"page":"381-400","title":"Hosting the comfortably exotic: Cosmopolitan aspirations in the sharing economy","type":"article-journal","volume":"66"},"suppress-author":true}],"schema":""} (2018) Airbnb hosts aim to meet and connect with exotic others, although they put limits on the extent of exoticism they desire—and aim for what he a terms a “comfortable” level of alterity. In our research, we find that respondents have social orientations to their sharing practices ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"wFy5djuH","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Fitzmaurice et al. 2018)","plainCitation":"(Fitzmaurice et al. 2018)"},"citationItems":[{"id":1083,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":1083,"type":"article-journal","title":"Domesticating the Market: Moral exchange and the sharing economy","container-title":"Socio-Economic Review","volume":"mwy003","note":"00000","author":[{"family":"Fitzmaurice","given":"Connor"},{"family":"Ladegaard","given":"Isak"},{"family":"Attwood-Charles","given":"Will"},{"family":"Cansoy","given":"Mehmet"},{"family":"Carfagna","given":"Lindsey B."},{"family":"Schor","given":"Juliet B."},{"family":"Wengronowitz","given":"Robert"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2018"]]}}}],"schema":""} (Fitzmaurice et al. 2018). For them, the sector offers social connection, flexibility, autonomy, and novel means for entrepreneurship and money-making. They identify as actors in an innovative attempt to transform markets from the bottom up, to make them morally accountable, and forces for social good. So, for example, they experience their peer-to-peer exchanges as having higher levels of personal accountability and social interaction. They engage in face-to-face connection and distinguish exchanges from commodified transactions with impersonal corporations. This is one reason they like platform payment mechanisms (credit cards and electronic transfers) which operate “backstage” or out of view and allow them to avoid the awkwardness of discussing money in this personalized relationship. Ikkala and Lampinen ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"27Iod0cW","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(2015)","plainCitation":"(2015)"},"citationItems":[{"id":1056,"uris":["",""],"uri":["",""],"itemData":{"id":1056,"type":"paper-conference","title":"Monetizing Network Hospitality: Hospitality and Sociability in the Context of Airbnb","container-title":"CSCW’15 Proceedings of the ACM 2015 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work","publisher":"ACM","publisher-place":"New York, NY","page":"1033-1044","source":"CrossRef","event-place":"New York, NY","DOI":"10.1145/2675133.2675274","ISBN":"978-1-4503-2922-4","shortTitle":"Monetizing Network Hospitality","language":"en","author":[{"family":"Ikkala","given":"Tapio"},{"family":"Lampinen","given":"Airi"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2015"]]},"accessed":{"date-parts":[["2015",11,21]]}},"suppress-author":true}],"schema":""} (2015) find that hosts feel monetization frees them to engage in hospitality with a greater sense of ease and control and ease. We also find that participants hold ideals of community, seeing trading partners as potential long-lasting connections. Rather than extending their critiques of the market to this sector, our participants see an opportunity to build an innovative kind of market. In an early paper ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"InUq62vY","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Schor 2015)","plainCitation":"(Schor 2015)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Schor","given":"Juliet B.","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Unpublished paper, Boston College","id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["2015"]]},"title":"Homo Varians: Diverse Motives and Economic Behavior in the Sharing Economy","type":"article-journal"}}],"schema":""} (Schor 2015) on three for-profit platforms (Airbnb, RelayRides and TaskRabbit) with a sample of just over 40 earners, we found strong social motives among the three distinct economic models of behavior we found. Indeed, social orientation and inter-personal relations were key for a plurality of the group. While they do appreciate the ability to earn money, their orientation was relational. Some refrain from charging what the market will bear for ethical reasons. Some Airbnb hosts in this group offer their homes gratis on Couchsurfing, or claim that they would continue to host even if they had all the money they could want. They describe socializing with their guests and in some cases developing long-term friendships. TaskRabbits also frequently discuss the social dimensions of their work. By contrast, under one-third of the sample conform to the assumptions of the neoliberal subject. These homo economici, who are more likely to be found on RelayRides and TaskRabbit than Airbnb, are income maximizers with limited social motivations. Among the third group, homo instrumentalis, platforms are just a way to earn the limited amounts of money they need to meet their expenses. They are not oriented to maximization and are motivated more by survival than wealth accumulation. They do not have the entrepreneurial, risk-taking attitude characteristic of neoliberal subjectivity. However, it is also the case that not all socially oriented participants are satisfied. A number of these platforms fail to deliver durable social ties even for people who want them. At the timebank, we found many participants were disappointed in the extent of social connection they developed ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"8UWtT3IL","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Dubois, Schor, and Carfagna 2014)","plainCitation":"(Dubois, Schor, and Carfagna 2014)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Dubois","given":"Emilie","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Schor","given":"Juliet","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Carfagna","given":"Lindsey","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Sustainable Lifestyles and The Quest for Plentitude: Case Studies of the New Economy","editor":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Schor","given":"Juliet","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["2014"]]},"page":"95-124","publisher":"Yale University Press","publisher-place":"New Haven, CT","title":"New Cultures of Connection in a Boston Time Bank","type":"chapter"}}],"schema":""} (Dubois, Schor, and Carfagna 2014). At the food swap, some participants articulated regret that their socializing with fellow swappers never rose to the level of meeting outside the swap ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"reMO5P0s","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Fitzmaurice and Schor 2018)","plainCitation":"(Fitzmaurice and Schor 2018)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Fitzmaurice","given":"Connor","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Schor","given":"Juliet B.","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Social Problems","id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["2018"]]},"title":"Homemade Matters: Logics of Exclusion in a Failed Food Swap","type":"article-journal","volume":"spx046"}}],"schema":""} (Fitzmaurice and Schor 2018). In her study of carsharing, Fenton found that the two parties to the transaction often never met, on account of remote access technology ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"dpOKCHg6","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Fenton 2015)","plainCitation":"(Fenton 2015)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Fenton","given":"Anny","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["2015"]]},"language":"en","publisher":"Unpublished manuscript","title":"It's borrowing not renting: Comparing peer-to-peer and traditional rental car markets to explore how ties to products shape economic exchanges","type":"article"}}],"schema":""} (Fenton 2015). We also find this with some Airbnb users. Parigi and State ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"B3OS2Zqe","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(2014)","plainCitation":"(2014)","dontUpdate":true},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Parigi","given":"Paolo","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"State","given":"Bogdan","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Social Informatics","id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["2014"]]},"page":"166-182","title":"Disenchanting the World: The Impact of Technology on Relationships","type":"article-journal","volume":"8851"}}],"schema":""} (Parigi and State 2014) also found that over time the ability of Couchsurfers to make durable ties declined. We found that most of our respondents have constructed an economic imaginary which is pre-capitalist, pre-modern and rooted in a vision of the domestic sphere ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"OmwdGgWZ","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Fitzmaurice et al. 2018)","plainCitation":"(Fitzmaurice et al. 2018)"},"citationItems":[{"id":1083,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":1083,"type":"article-journal","title":"Domesticating the Market: Moral exchange and the sharing economy","container-title":"Socio-Economic Review","volume":"mwy003","note":"00000","author":[{"family":"Fitzmaurice","given":"Connor"},{"family":"Ladegaard","given":"Isak"},{"family":"Attwood-Charles","given":"Will"},{"family":"Cansoy","given":"Mehmet"},{"family":"Carfagna","given":"Lindsey B."},{"family":"Schor","given":"Juliet B."},{"family":"Wengronowitz","given":"Robert"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2018"]]}}}],"schema":""} (Fitzmaurice et al. 2018). For many of them, such as Airbnb hosts and TaskRabbit providers, the market is literally enacted within the home. For others, communal sites such as makerspaces and food swaps reproduce domesticity via small-scale community and intimate relations. Among them all, we find a desire to build markets which foster and value artisanal, craft-like production, whether it is by offering prepared food at a swap, a personalized, cozy Airbnb bedroom, or literal craft production in a makerspace. Their vision of a “moral market” is rooted in the return of small-scale economic production within a domestic sphere. In these ways, participants reproduce the idealistic discourse of the early days of the sharing economy. If the profit motive has transformed these platforms from the feel-good, do-good hybrids of the early days to market-savvy growth maximizers, this shift is recognized unevenly by participants. This is one reason we argue that the neoliberal critique is at best partial—or at worst reliant on an explanation in which participants must be seen as duped, unaware of their own interests and their role in a transformation that is undermining their own well-being and that of others. The moral orientation of sharing economy participants is not something that is segregated from their general consumer orientation. In contrast to the arguments of Lamont ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"YDrtlh8z","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(1992)","plainCitation":"(1992)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"ISBN":"978-0-226-46815-0","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Lamont","given":"Michèle","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"collection-title":"Morality and society","id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["1992"]]},"number-of-pages":"320","publisher":"University of Chicago Press","publisher-place":"Chicago","title":"Money, morals, and manners: the culture of the French and American upper-middle class","type":"book"},"suppress-author":true}],"schema":""} (1992) who argues that Bourdieu under-theorized morality, and that cultural capital and morality are largely independent, we find that moral considerations are at the heart of the emergent HCC habitus ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"RFA9Rc8A","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Carfagna et al. 2014)","plainCitation":"(Carfagna et al. 2014)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"DOI":"10.1177/1469540514526227","ISSN":"1469-5405","abstract":"Bourdieu’s concept of habitus describes a set of tastes and dispositions operating according to a class homology – for example, a working-class preference for utility, or a bourgeois orientation toward luxury. In the United States, Holt found that high cultural capital consumers were characterized by their cosmopolitanism, idealism, connoisseurship, and affinity for the exotic and authentic. In this article, we use Holt’s analysis as a comparative case, finding an altered high cultural capital habitus incorporating environmental awareness and sustainability principles, in a configuration that has been called ethical or “conscious consumption.” Using both quantitative survey data of self-described conscious consumers as well as four qualitative case studies, we argue that ethical consumers are overwhelmingly high cultural capital consumers, and that high cultural capital consumption strategies have shifted since Holt’s study in the mid-1990s. We show that on a number of dimensions – cosmopolitanism, idealism, and relation to manual labor – a new high cultural capital consumer repertoire privileges the local, material, and manual, while maintaining a strategy of distinction. While the critical literature on conscious consumers has suggested that such practices reflect neo-liberal tendencies that individualize environmental responsibility, our findings suggest that such practices are hardly individual. Rather, they are collective strategies of consumption – what we have termed an emerging high cultural capital “eco-habitus.” ","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Carfagna","given":"Lindsey B","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Dubois","given":"Emilie a","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Fitzmaurice","given":"Connor","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Ouimette","given":"Monique Y","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Schor","given":"Juliet B","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Willis","given":"Margaret","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Laidley","given":"Thomas","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Journal of Consumer Culture ","id":"ITEM-1","issue":"2 ","issued":{"date-parts":[["2014"]]},"page":"158-178","title":"An emerging eco-habitus: The reconfiguration of high cultural capital practices among ethical consumers","type":"article-journal","volume":"14 "}}],"schema":""} (Carfagna et al. 2014). They are not orthogonal to the basic binaries that structure HCC tastes and practices, but underlie those foundational orientations. The “ecological” logic of the habitus is a moral stance toward nature, other species and humans. We see this logic played out most clearly in the timebanks, food swaps, gift sites, repair collectives, and food sharing apps. Reducing resource use, providing healthful, local food for people who need it and giving free or low-cost access to goods and services are central to the motives of participants. They have an “eco-habitus,” not so much because it represents a low-impact lifestyle in environmental terms (although it can), but because it habitus is structured by calculations about, consideration of and attention to an ecological sensibility. We have identified three dimensions of the eco-habitus. They are a preference for the local (over the global), the manual (over the mental), and the material (over the abstract). These are in contrast to the earlier findings of Holt ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"Rm36rJ1A","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(1998)","plainCitation":"(1998)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"DOI":"10.1086/209523","ISSN":"0093-5301, 1537-5277","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Holt","given":"Douglas?B.","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Journal of Consumer Research","id":"ITEM-1","issue":"1","issued":{"date-parts":[["1998","6"]]},"language":"en","page":"1-25","title":"Does Cultural Capital Structure American Consumption?","type":"article-journal","volume":"25"},"suppress-author":true}],"schema":""} (1998) and Bourdieu ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"CtwQaYPU","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(1984)","plainCitation":"(1984)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"ISBN":"0674212770","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Bourdieu","given":"Pierre","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["1984"]]},"publisher":"Harvard University Press","publisher-place":"Cambridge, MA","title":"Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste","type":"book"},"suppress-author":1}],"schema":""} (1984), and represent a shift in how HCC consumers locate themselves with respect to longstanding binaries that shape the field of lifestyles ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"y8hchQ88","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Bourdieu 1984; Carfagna et al. 2014; Fitzmaurice and Schor 2018)","plainCitation":"(Bourdieu 1984; Carfagna et al. 2014; Fitzmaurice and Schor 2018)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"ISBN":"0674212770","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Bourdieu","given":"Pierre","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["1984"]]},"publisher":"Harvard University Press","publisher-place":"Cambridge, MA","title":"Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste","type":"book"}},{"id":"ITEM-2","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"DOI":"10.1177/1469540514526227","ISSN":"1469-5405","abstract":"Bourdieu’s concept of habitus describes a set of tastes and dispositions operating according to a class homology – for example, a working-class preference for utility, or a bourgeois orientation toward luxury. In the United States, Holt found that high cultural capital consumers were characterized by their cosmopolitanism, idealism, connoisseurship, and affinity for the exotic and authentic. In this article, we use Holt’s analysis as a comparative case, finding an altered high cultural capital habitus incorporating environmental awareness and sustainability principles, in a configuration that has been called ethical or “conscious consumption.” Using both quantitative survey data of self-described conscious consumers as well as four qualitative case studies, we argue that ethical consumers are overwhelmingly high cultural capital consumers, and that high cultural capital consumption strategies have shifted since Holt’s study in the mid-1990s. We show that on a number of dimensions – cosmopolitanism, idealism, and relation to manual labor – a new high cultural capital consumer repertoire privileges the local, material, and manual, while maintaining a strategy of distinction. While the critical literature on conscious consumers has suggested that such practices reflect neo-liberal tendencies that individualize environmental responsibility, our findings suggest that such practices are hardly individual. Rather, they are collective strategies of consumption – what we have termed an emerging high cultural capital “eco-habitus.” ","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Carfagna","given":"Lindsey B","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Dubois","given":"Emilie a","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Fitzmaurice","given":"Connor","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Ouimette","given":"Monique Y","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Schor","given":"Juliet B","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Willis","given":"Margaret","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Laidley","given":"Thomas","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Journal of Consumer Culture ","id":"ITEM-2","issue":"2 ","issued":{"date-parts":[["2014"]]},"page":"158-178","title":"An emerging eco-habitus: The reconfiguration of high cultural capital practices among ethical consumers","type":"article-journal","volume":"14 "}},{"id":"ITEM-3","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Fitzmaurice","given":"Connor","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Schor","given":"Juliet B.","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Social Problems","id":"ITEM-3","issued":{"date-parts":[["2018"]]},"title":"Homemade Matters: Logics of Exclusion in a Failed Food Swap","type":"article-journal","volume":"spx046"}}],"schema":""} (Bourdieu 1984; Carfagna et al. 2014; Fitzmaurice and Schor 2018). Participants enact these three dimensions in their sharing practices. The first is the most overtly articulated, in large part because it is so salient in the discourses of sharing sites. Food swaps, timebanks, tool libraries, and neighborhood goods sharing platforms are all committed to building local economies of production and consumption. Consumers categorize these initiatives with other efforts to “Buy Local,” such as farmers’ markets and Community-Supported Agriculture. But the preference for the local is also present in large, for-profit platforms such as Airbnb. “Live like a local,” is not merely a branding slogan, but a theme that comes up repeatedly in guests’ discussions of why they like the platform. Guests are appreciative of insider knowledge of restaurants, bars, and other consumer experiences. They enjoy living in “real” neighborhoods, rather than being confined to tourist-filled city centers. Disdaining mass tourism, as they reject mass consumption more generally, Airbnb gives them an opportunity to live in the homes of locals and to experience local culture. Airbnb’s recently introduced “Experiences” market takes the local experience farther, offering not merely lodging and knowledge of retail, but the opportunity to spend time with local hosts and their friends—for a price, of course. (This new product gives additional fodder for critics’ view that the platforms are colonizing daily life.) We note that there is a certain contradiction in this discourse—as guests often travel long distances, and even globally—to experience the local. Furthermore, we find that the “local” that is desired by HCC consumers is an upscale, cosmopolitan local, that is distinct from the “parochial” local that Holt’s lower cultural capital consumers preferred. The second and third dimensions of the eco-habitus, the manual and the material, are closely related. In the earlier postwar era analyzed by Holt ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"AmMgEw3A","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(1998)","plainCitation":"(1998)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"DOI":"10.1086/209523","ISSN":"0093-5301, 1537-5277","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Holt","given":"Douglas?B.","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Journal of Consumer Research","id":"ITEM-1","issue":"1","issued":{"date-parts":[["1998","6"]]},"language":"en","page":"1-25","title":"Does Cultural Capital Structure American Consumption?","type":"article-journal","volume":"25"},"suppress-author":1}],"schema":""} (1998) and Bourdieu ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"JR61IHWB","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(1984)","plainCitation":"(1984)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"ISBN":"0674212770","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Bourdieu","given":"Pierre","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["1984"]]},"publisher":"Harvard University Press","publisher-place":"Cambridge, MA","title":"Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste","type":"book"},"suppress-author":1}],"schema":""} (1984), the HCC habitus was oriented away toward the abstract and ideal, and away from the mundane and material, which was associated with the working class. In contrast, we find that sharing economy participants have an orientation toward doing things with their hands and being creative. “Hacking” everyday objects by working to transform them is a popular trend among young HCCs who exhibit the eco-habitus. As one participant noted: “what I know is that if I’m not creating, life is miserable.” The urge to create is almost axiomatic at the makerspace, but participants in other sites also engage in manual practices. At the food swap, offerings must be “homemade,” that is, made by hand. Timebankers use the network to learn manual skills, such as whittling. They also discuss their desire to escape from the “mental” orientation of day jobs such as coding, to offer manual skills like home repair and gardening. Participants for-profit platforms engage in and extol manual skills. Many TaskRabbits assemble Ikea furniture. One provider spent much of his interview bemoaning the loss of knowledge of plumbing, and other home repair skills. TaskRabbit consumers discussed their attraction to manual tasks such as repurposing furniture. Some Airbnb guests discussed their preference for homes over hotels because they could engage in manual practices such as cooking or ritualized coffee preparation, without interruption ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"SJu87Lh5","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Fitzmaurice and Schor 2018)","plainCitation":"(Fitzmaurice and Schor 2018)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"xfSdPSKt/IiTlFSpA","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Fitzmaurice","given":"Connor","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Schor","given":"Juliet B.","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Social Problems","id":"xfSdPSKt/IiTlFSpA","issued":{"year":2018},"title":"Homemade Matters: Logics of Exclusion in a Failed Food Swap","type":"article-journal","volume":"spx046","container-title-short":"Soc. Probl."}}],"schema":""} (Fitzmaurice and Schor 2018). The turn toward manual labor, and away from the traditional HCC realms of the abstract, mental and intellectual, is also connected to the importance of materiality in the eco-habitus. Our respondents talk about the qualities of the foods they embrace and reject. They have a tactile orientation, especially to natural materials such as wood. They like to get their hands dirty with soil. They reject materials that are too closely connected with mass consumption, such as plastic. This is one reason many prefer the more personalized experiences they can construct on a platform like Airbnb or TaskRabbit. While the eco-habitus is not exclusive to the sharing economy, we do find that the moral aspirations of the HCC consumers we study mesh well with the common good claims of the sharing economy. Personalized, small-scale exchange, creativity and autonomy are central to the enactment of an eco-habitus. At a time when global capitalism is generating extreme inequality, climate derangement, and social disconnection, the consumers we study are looking for an alternative. Whether the sharing economy truly represents one, or is merely “neoliberalism on steroids,” as its critics claim, our participants are optimistic about its potential.Inequality and the Sharing Economy: race and classAs noted earlier, the for-profit segment of the sharing economy has put forward common good claims of efficiency, sociability and environmental benefit. Companies also claim to increase equity. One claim is that it benefits disadvantaged groups via enhanced access to economic opportunity. However, independent empirical studies have consistently found that discrimination, based primarily on race, is widespread. Another claim is the sector provides income to struggling middle class households. The evidence here is mixed, particularly if one also includes the losses of jobs and income associated with “disrupted” industries. We think the more likely effect is that platforms are increasing incomes for the better-off segments of the middle class at the expense of lower-educated workers. We start with the latter issue and then move on to discuss racial discrimination. The economic opportunities presented by the sharing economy are often discussed in terms of potential benefits to providers. Proponents focus on how the platforms eliminate formal, onerous and expensive barriers to entry in the market for transportation (taxi medallions) or accommodations (licensing). This allows individuals who could not have cleared those barriers a chance to compete ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"162LKrzn","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Horton and Zeckhauser 2016; Zervas, Proserpio, and Byers 2015)","plainCitation":"(Horton and Zeckhauser 2016; Zervas, Proserpio, and Byers 2015)"},"citationItems":[{"id":1215,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":1215,"type":"article-journal","title":"Owning, Using and Renting: Some Simple Economics of the\" Sharing Economy\"","container-title":"NBER Working Paper","volume":"22029","source":"Google Scholar","URL":"","note":"00002","shortTitle":"Owning, Using and Renting","author":[{"family":"Horton","given":"John J."},{"family":"Zeckhauser","given":"Richard J."}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2016"]]},"accessed":{"date-parts":[["2016",8,11]]}}},{"id":"ITEM-2","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"DOI":"10.1145/2764468.2764524","ISBN":"9781450334105","abstract":"Spurred by technological advancement, a number of decentralized peer-to-peer markets, now colloquially known as the sharing economy, have emerged as alternative suppliers of goods and services traditionally provided by long-established industries. A central question surrounding the sharing economy regards its long-term impact: will peer-to-peer platforms materialize as viable mainstream alternatives to traditional providers, or will they languish as niche markets? In this paper, we study Airbnb, a sharing economy pioneer offering short-term accommodation. Combining data from Airbnb and the Texas hotel industry, we estimate the impact of Airbnb's entry into the Texas market on hotel room revenue, and study the market response of hotels. To identify Airbnb's causal impact on hotel room revenue, we use a difference-in-differences empirical strategy that exploits the significant spatiotemporal variation in the patterns of Airbnb adoption across citylevel markets. We estimate that each 10% increase in Airbnb supply results in a 0:37% decrease in monthly hotel room revenue. In Austin, where Airbnb supply is highest, the impact on hotel revenue exceeds 10%. We find that Airbnb's impact is non-uniformly distributed, with lower-priced hotels, and hotels not catering to business travel being the most affected segments. Finally, we find that affected hotels have responded by reducing prices, an impact that benefits all consumers, not just participants in the sharing economy. Our work provides empirical evidence that the sharing economy is making inroads by successfully competing with, and acquiring market share from, incumbent firms.","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Zervas","given":"Georgios","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Proserpio","given":"Davide","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Byers","given":"John W","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Proceedings of the Sixteenth ACM Conference on Economics and Computation - EC '15","id":"ITEM-2","issued":{"date-parts":[["2015"]]},"page":"637-637","title":"The Impact of the Sharing Economy on the Hotel Industry","type":"article-journal"}}],"schema":""} (Horton and Zeckhauser 2016; Zervas, Proserpio, and Byers 2015). A less remarked upon but also relevant point is that some platforms do not discriminate against providers with criminal records, in contrast to most employers ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"0kKtsBhl","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Pager 2008)","plainCitation":"(Pager 2008)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2822,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2822,"type":"book","title":"Marked: Race, crime, and finding work in an era of mass incarceration","publisher":"University of Chicago Press","publisher-place":"Chicago, IL","event-place":"Chicago, IL","ISBN":"0-226-64485-5","author":[{"family":"Pager","given":"Devah"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2008"]]}}}],"schema":""} (Pager 2008), although over time pressure to exclude those with records has increased, especially on ridehailing platforms. In any case, platforms have relatively low barriers to entry, in comparison to conventional employment. Signing up is often as easy as filling out some fields on an app and attending an orientation session, or listing a property. In theory, this should disproportionately benefit groups with fewer resources, such as youth, the poor and racial minorities. While national surveys have not published data that would allow us to test this finding, in our limited, local sample, we find that earning on platforms is stratified by income and race, with the more lucrative sites having participants who are whiter, higher-income and higher-educated. Proponents of the “economic opportunity” argument also note that some platforms allow people to earn passive income by renting out capital goods they have access to ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"aHjRkFng","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Fraiberger and Sundararajan 2015; Sperling 2015)","plainCitation":"(Fraiberger and Sundararajan 2015; Sperling 2015)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"DOI":"10.2139/ssrn.2574337","ISSN":"1556-5068","abstract":"Will the sharing economy create long-run economic value? We develop a new dynamic model of peer-to-peer Internet-enabled rental markets for durable goods in which consumers may also trade their durable assets in (traditional) secondary markets, transaction costs and depreciation rates may vary with usage intensity, and consumers are heterogeneous in their price sensitivity and asset utilization rates. We characterize the stationary equilibrium of the model. We analyze the welfare and distributional effects of introducing these rental markets by calibrating our model with US automobile industry data and 2 years of transaction-level data we have obtained from Getaround, a large peer-to-peer car rental marketplace. Our counterfactual analyses vary marketplace access levels and matching frictions, showing that peer-to-peer rental markets change the allocation of goods significantly, substituting rental for ownership and lowering used-good prices while increasing consumer surplus. Consumption shifts and economic impact are significantly more pronounced for below-median income users, who also provide a majority of rental supply. Our results also suggest that these below-median income consumers will enjoy a disproportionate fraction of eventual welfare gains from this kind of 'sharing economy' through broader inclusion, higher quality rental-based consumption, and new ownership facilitated by rental supply revenues.","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Fraiberger","given":"Samuel P.","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Sundararajan","given":"Arun","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"NYU Stern School of Business Research Paper","id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["2015"]]},"page":"1-44","title":"Peer-to-Peer Rental Markets in the Sharing Economy","type":"article-journal"}},{"id":"ITEM-2","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"URL":"","accessed":{"date-parts":[["2016","3","5"]]},"author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Sperling","given":"Gene","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"id":"ITEM-2","issued":{"date-parts":[["2015"]]},"title":"How Airbnb Combats Middle Class Income Stagnation","type":"webpage"}}],"schema":""} (Fraiberger and Sundararajan 2015; Sperling 2015), or even tap into a higher rate of return on their capital goods than they otherwise would through conventional wage labor ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"CDgBLuyt","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Sundararajan 2016)","plainCitation":"(Sundararajan 2016)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"ISBN":"0262034573","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Sundararajan","given":"Arun","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["2016"]]},"publisher":"MIT Press","publisher-place":"Cambridge, MA","title":"The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism","type":"book"}}],"schema":""} (Sundararajan 2016). It is also the case that especially when they were introduced, sharing economy platforms offered higher wages for lower skilled labor than were generally available in local labor markets. However, the existence of the wage premium is now contentious in the case of ridehailing, as wages have fallen and wages net of expenses are complicated to estimate. Writing for Uber, Hall and Krueger ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"lTRJQbgw","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(2016)","plainCitation":"(2016)"},"citationItems":[{"id":447,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":447,"type":"article-journal","title":"An Analysis of the Labor Market for Uber's Driver-Partners in the United States","container-title":"NBER Working Paper","issue":"22843","URL":"","author":[{"family":"Hall","given":"Jonathan"},{"family":"Krueger","given":"Alan B."}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2016"]]}},"suppress-author":1}],"schema":""} (2016) have argued that the sharing economy is a flexible source of income to compensate for instability in conventional labor markets. Indeed, as the conventional labor market has improved, the growth participation slowed markedly ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"jiJcOYdm","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Farrell and Greig 2016)","plainCitation":"(Farrell and Greig 2016)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2581,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2581,"type":"article-journal","title":"Paychecks, Paydays, and the Online Platform Economy: Big Data on Income Volatility","container-title":"JP Morgan Chase Institute","source":"Google Scholar","URL":"","note":"00012","shortTitle":"Paychecks, Paydays, and the Online Platform Economy","author":[{"family":"Farrell","given":"Diana"},{"family":"Greig","given":"Fiona"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2016"]]},"accessed":{"date-parts":[["2017",5,29]]}}}],"schema":""} (Farrell and Greig 2016). Airbnb has argued that hosting “combats middle class income stagnation,” allowing people to remain in homes they could not otherwise afford or helping them weather job loss or other adverse events ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"MtbegLlU","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Sperling 2015)","plainCitation":"(Sperling 2015)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"URL":"","accessed":{"date-parts":[["2016","3","5"]]},"author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Sperling","given":"Gene","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["2015"]]},"title":"How Airbnb Combats Middle Class Income Stagnation","type":"webpage"}}],"schema":""} (Sperling 2015). The sector also consumers opportunities to purchase goods such as cars or lodging at cheaper prices ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"5PJwCBhn","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Horton and Zeckhauser 2016)","plainCitation":"(Horton and Zeckhauser 2016)"},"citationItems":[{"id":1215,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":1215,"type":"article-journal","title":"Owning, Using and Renting: Some Simple Economics of the\" Sharing Economy\"","container-title":"NBER Working Paper","volume":"22029","source":"Google Scholar","URL":"","note":"00002","shortTitle":"Owning, Using and Renting","author":[{"family":"Horton","given":"John J."},{"family":"Zeckhauser","given":"Richard J."}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2016"]]},"accessed":{"date-parts":[["2016",8,11]]}}}],"schema":""} (Horton and Zeckhauser 2016). On the other hand, there is growing evidence that Uber is using its market power and asymmetric access to information to extract value, compress wages and control workers ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"PEuS22fs","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Calo and Rosenblat 2017)","plainCitation":"(Calo and Rosenblat 2017)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Calo","given":"Ryan","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Rosenblat","given":"Alex","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Columbia Law Review","id":"ITEM-1","issue":"6","issued":{"date-parts":[["2017"]]},"page":"1623–1690","title":"The taking economy: Uber, information, and power","type":"article-journal","volume":"117"}}],"schema":""} (Calo and Rosenblat 2017), and that these advantages to the platform are endemic to this sector. The “middle class income stagnation” argument suggests an equity effect that begs further study, which is that the sharing sector is benefitting middle class, highly educated people at the expense of the working class. People who are already privileged in the conventional economy may be taking jobs and income from less privileged participants and creating more inequality within the bottom 80% of the income distribution ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"X9Se4qrt","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Schor 2017)","plainCitation":"(Schor 2017)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Schor","given":"Juliet B.","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society","id":"ITEM-1","issue":"263-279","issued":{"date-parts":[["2017"]]},"title":"Does the sharing economy increase inequality within the eighty percent?: findings from a qualitative study of platform providers","type":"article-journal","volume":"10"}}],"schema":""} (Schor 2017). In our qualitative data, two findings suggest this outcome. First, sharing platforms have led highly educated young people to take on work that has traditionally been done by those of lower educational attainment. Examples include driving (higher educated Uber drivers taking away work from taxi drivers), Airbnb hosts taking business from hotels (whose cleaning staff are immigrant women with lower educational attainment), and gig labor sites taking jobs from informal workers (such as domestic house cleaners, another low educated, immigrant labor force). The platforms appear to have erased some of the stigma associated with these low status jobs, perhaps because they are technologically novel and emerged with a hip, common good discourse and youth “vibe.” The extent of this effect cannot not be determined without a comprehensive model of each local economy, in part because platforms are reducing the demand for conventional labor, but also increasing total consumer demand for these services. However, the collapse of the taxi business and the movement of leisure travelers out of urban hotels suggests that for the two largest platforms (Uber and Airbnb), the effects may be significant. This type of effect is also typical of recessionary times—more privileged workers move down the labor market ladder, pushing out those below them. A second effect is that most sharing economy earners have other sources of income. In our sample, only about 30% are “full-timers” who rely on the platform to pay their basic ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"Ej9ql4HF","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Schor et al. 2017)","plainCitation":"(Schor et al. 2017)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Schor","given":"Juliet B","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Attwood-Charles","given":"Will","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Cansoy","given":"Mehmet","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Ladegaard","given":"Isak","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Wengronowitz","given":"Robert","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Unpublished paper, Boston College","id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["2017"]]},"title":"Dependence and Precarity in the Sharing Economy","type":"article-journal"}}],"schema":""} (Schor et al. 2017). Many have full-time jobs and use the income for discretionary or even luxury spending. These supplementary earnings increase income for better-off workers, and to the extent that there is job loss in conventional employment also erode earnings at the bottom. This effect will make the income distribution from the upper middle to the bottom of the distribution more unequal.Platforms are also having impacts on racial inequality. Because they have been mostly unregulated, there has been little explicit policy outlawing discrimination. In the lodging sector, for example, public accommodation laws that prevent racial discrimination do not apply. And for the most part platforms have taken a hands-off approach to discriminatory behavior by their users. All the studies we have identified have found the presence of racial discrimination, on one side of the market, the other, or both. We begin with studies which analyze discrimination against consumers. An audit study by Edelman, Luca, and Svirsky ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"LxmZdjkx","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(2017, 1)","plainCitation":"(2017, 1)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"DOI":"10.2139/ssrn.2701902","ISSN":"1556-5068","abstract":"Online marketplaces increasingly choose to reduce the anonymity of buyers and sellers in order to facilitate trust. We demonstrate that this common market design choice results in an important unintended consequence: racial discrimination. In a field experiment on Airbnb, we find that requests from guests with distinctively African-American names are roughly 16% less likely to be accepted than identical guests with distinctively White names. The difference persists whether the host is African American or White, male or female. The difference also persists whether the host shares the property with the guest or not, and whether the property is cheap or expensive. Discrimination is costly for hosts who indulge in it: hosts who reject African-American guests are able to find a replacement guest only 35% of the time. On the whole, our analysis suggests a need for caution: while information can facilitate transactions, it also facilitates discrimination.","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Edelman","given":"Benjamin","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Luca","given":"Michael","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Svirsky","given":"Dan","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"American Economic Journal: Applied Economics","id":"ITEM-1","issue":"2","issued":{"date-parts":[["2017"]]},"page":"1-22","title":"Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment","type":"article-journal","volume":"9"},"locator":"1","suppress-author":1}],"schema":""} (2017, 1) has found that guest accounts on Airbnb with “distinctively African-American names were 16% less likely to be accepted [for a reservation] than identical accounts with distinctively White names”. A similar audit study by Cui, Li and Zhang ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"m9QdcMIM","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(2016)","plainCitation":"(2016)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2747,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2747,"type":"article-journal","title":"Discrimination with Incomplete Information in the Sharing Economy Field Evidence from Airbnb","container-title":"Working paper","URL":"","author":[{"family":"Cui","given":"Ruomeng"},{"family":"Li","given":"Jun"},{"family":"Zhang","given":"Dennis"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2016"]]}},"suppress-author":true}],"schema":""} (2016) found a similar sized effect for accounts associated with African-American and White names on the platform. Another audit study, focusing on the transportation platforms Uber and Lyft, found that consumers with distinctively African-American names faced higher waiting times, and more frequent cancellations ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"CyB73HGr","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Ge et al. 2016)","plainCitation":"(Ge et al. 2016)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2469,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2469,"type":"article-journal","title":"Racial and Gender Discrimination in Transportation Network Companies","container-title":"NBER Working Paper","volume":"22776","source":"NBER Working Papers","URL":"","note":"00003","author":[{"family":"Ge","given":"Yanbo"},{"family":"Knittel","given":"Christopher R."},{"family":"MacKenzie","given":"Don"},{"family":"Zoepf","given":"Stephen"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2016"]]}}}],"schema":""} (Ge et al. 2016). A mixed-methods study of TaskRabbit producers found that they engaged in discriminatory behavior based on the geographic location of consumers, reporting an unwillingness to accept jobs in areas with higher proportions of minority or low-income residents ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"T1yXNhdN","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Thebault-Spieker, Terveen, and Hecht 2015)","plainCitation":"(Thebault-Spieker, Terveen, and Hecht 2015)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"DOI":"10.1145/2675133.2675278","ISBN":"978-1-4503-2922-4","abstract":"Mobile crowdsourcing markets (e.g., Gigwalk and TaskRabbit) offer crowdworkers tasks situated in the physical world (e.g., checking street signs, running household errands). The geographic nature of these tasks distinguishes these markets from online crowdsourcing markets and raises new, fundamental questions. We carried out a controlled study in the Chicago metropolitan area aimed at addressing two key questions: (1) What geographic factors influence whether a crowdworker will be willing to do a task? (2) What geographic factors influence how much compensation a crowdworker will demand in order to do a task? Quantitative modeling shows that travel distance to the location of the task and the socioeconomic status (SES) of the task area are important factors. Qualitative analysis enriches our modeling, with workers mentioning safety and difficulties getting to a location as key considerations. Our results suggest that low-SES areas are currently less able to take advantage of the benefits of mobile crowdsourcing markets. We discuss the implications of our study for these markets, as well as for \" sharing economy \" phenomena like UberX, which have many properties in common with mobile crowdsourcing markets.","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Thebault-Spieker","given":"Jacob","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Terveen","given":"Loren G","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Hecht","given":"Brent","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing","id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["2015"]]},"page":"265-275","title":"Avoiding the South Side and the Suburbs: The Geography of Mobile Crowdsourcing Markets","type":"paper-conference"}}],"schema":""} (Thebault-Spieker, Terveen, and Hecht 2015). On the provider side of the market, Edelman and Luca ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"54N0DFVV","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(2014)","plainCitation":"(2014)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"DOI":"10.2139/ssrn.2377353","ISSN":"1556-5068","abstract":"Online marketplaces often contain information not only about products, but also about the people selling the products. In an effort to facilitate trust, many platforms encourage sellers to provide personal profiles and even to post pictures of themselves. However, these features may also facilitate discrimination based on sellers' race, gender, age, or other aspects of appearance. In this paper, we test for racial discrimination against landlords in the online rental marketplace . Using a new data set combining pictures of all New York City landlords on Airbnb with their rental prices and information about quality of the rentals, we show that non-black hosts charge approximately 12% more than black hosts for the equivalent rental. These effects are robust when controlling for all information visible in the Airbnb marketplace. These findings highlight the prevalence of discrimination in online marketplaces, suggesting an important unintended consequence of a seemingly-routine mechanism for building trust.","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Edelman","given":"Benjamin","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Luca","given":"Michael","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Harvard Business School","id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["2014"]]},"page":"21","title":"Digital Discrimination: The Case of ","type":"article-journal"},"suppress-author":1}],"schema":""} (2014) found that hosts, who were identified as Black based on their pictures charged 12% less per night on Airbnb, compared to similar listings with non-Black hosts. Laouenan and Rathelot ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"NQzH4Ezo","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(2016)","plainCitation":"(2016)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2444,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2444,"type":"article-journal","title":"Ethnic Discrimination in an Online Marketplace of Vacation Rentals","container-title":"Working paper","URL":"","note":"00000","author":[{"family":"Laouenan","given":"Morgane"},{"family":"Rathelot","given":"Roland"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2016"]]},"accessed":{"date-parts":[["2018",3,17]]}},"suppress-author":1}],"schema":""} (2016) present similar results, with minority hosts charging about 3% less than non-minority hosts. A study on TaskRabbit and Fiverr found that producers who were identified as female or Black received fewer reviews, indicating that they are hired less often ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"G7yKHm7U","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Hannak et al. 2017)","plainCitation":"(Hannak et al. 2017)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"DOI":"10.1145/2998181.2998327","ISBN":"9781450343350","abstract":"In this paper, we study whether TaskRabbit, a prominent on- line freelance marketplace, is impacted by racial and gen- der bias. We collect all worker profiles from TaskRabbit to gather information about workers’ gender, race, customer reviews, ratings, and positions in search rankings. We find that gender and race are significantly correlated with worker evaluations, as well as the workers’ rank in search results. We hope that our study fuels more research on the presence and implications of discrimination in online environments","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Hannak","given":"Aniko","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Wagner","given":"Claudia","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Garcia","given":"David","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Mislove","given":"Alan","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Strohmaier","given":"Markus","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Wilson","given":"Christo","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Cscw '17","id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["2017"]]},"page":"1914-1933","title":"Bias in Online Freelance Marketplaces : Evidence from TaskRabbit","type":"article-journal"}}],"schema":""} (Hannak et al. 2017). A 2017 report about Airbnb found that even in Black majority neighborhoods in New York City, the vast majority of hosts were White, suggesting that the platform’s economic opportunities are not equally distributed ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"KGBYvAlA","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Inside Airbnb 2017)","plainCitation":"(Inside Airbnb 2017)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"URL":"","abstract":"Case study: stuyvesant Heights, Central Brooklyn Airbnb Host Demographic Neighborhood Demographic WHITE 74.9% BLACK 20.1% OTHER 5.0% WHITE 7.4% BLACK 89.7% OTHER 2.9% 1,012% disparity airbnb Host demographic Neighborhood demographic across all 72 predominantly Black New York city neighborhoods, airbnb hosts are 5 times more likely to be white. In those neighborhoods, the Airbnb host population is 74% white, while the white resident population is only 13.9%","accessed":{"date-parts":[["2017","11","15"]]},"author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Inside Airbnb","given":"","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["2017"]]},"page":"1-22","publisher-place":"New York","title":"The Face of Airbnb, New York City: Airbnb as a Racial Gentrification Tool","type":"webpage"}}],"schema":""} (Inside Airbnb 2017). In our work on racial discrimination on Airbnb, we found that in the 10 largest markets in the U.S., areas with higher concentrations of residents of color had fewer listings on Airbnb ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"ou1vl6kT","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Cansoy and Schor 2018)","plainCitation":"(Cansoy and Schor 2018)"},"citationItems":[{"id":1055,"uris":["","",""],"uri":["","",""],"itemData":{"id":1055,"type":"article-journal","title":"Who Gets to Share in the “Sharing Economy”: Understanding the Patterns of Participation and Exchange in Airbnb","container-title":"Unpublished paper, Boston College","URL":"","note":"00000","author":[{"family":"Cansoy","given":"Mehmet"},{"family":"Schor","given":"Juliet B."}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2018"]]}}}],"schema":""} (Cansoy and Schor 2018). In these locales, Airbnb listings had lower prices and fewer bookings. A feature of the sector that is often touted as an important factor in reducing discrimination is the public reputation systems. Multiple studies have highlighted the potential of these systems to counteract interpersonal discrimination, by providing producers and consumers with relevant and trustworthy information about their counterparts ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"rEYnO09X","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Abrahao et al. 2017; Cui, Li, and Zhang 2016; Laouenan and Rathelot 2016)","plainCitation":"(Abrahao et al. 2017; Cui, Li, and Zhang 2016; Laouenan and Rathelot 2016)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"DOI":"10.1073/pnas.1604234114","ISSN":"0027-8424","PMID":"28847948","abstract":"To provide social exchange on a global level, sharing-economy companies leverage interpersonal trust between their members on a scale unimaginable even a few years ago. A challenge to this mission is the presence of social biases among a large heterogeneous and independent population of users, a factor that hinders the growth of these services. We investigate whether and to what extent a sharing-economy platform can design artificially engineered features, such as reputation systems, to override people's natural tendency to base judgments of trustworthiness on social biases. We focus on the common tendency to trust others who are similar (i.e., homophily) as a source of bias. We test this argument through an online experiment with 8,906 users of Airbnb, a leading hospitality company in the sharing economy. The experiment is based on an interpersonal investment game, in which we vary the characteristics of recipients to study trust through the interplay between homophily and reputation. Our findings show that reputation systems can significantly increase the trust between dissimilar users and that risk aversion has an inverse relationship with trust given high reputation. We also present evidence that our experimental findings are confirmed by analyses of 1 million actual hospitality interactions among users of Airbnb.","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Abrahao","given":"Bruno","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Parigi","given":"Paolo","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Gupta","given":"Alok","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Cook","given":"Karen S.","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences","id":"ITEM-1","issue":"37","issued":{"date-parts":[["2017"]]},"page":"201604234","title":"Reputation offsets trust judgments based on social biases among Airbnb users","type":"article-journal","volume":"114"}},{"id":2747,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2747,"type":"article-journal","title":"Discrimination with Incomplete Information in the Sharing Economy Field Evidence from Airbnb","container-title":"Working paper","URL":"","author":[{"family":"Cui","given":"Ruomeng"},{"family":"Li","given":"Jun"},{"family":"Zhang","given":"Dennis"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2016"]]}}},{"id":2444,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2444,"type":"article-journal","title":"Ethnic Discrimination in an Online Marketplace of Vacation Rentals","container-title":"Working paper","URL":"","note":"00000","author":[{"family":"Laouenan","given":"Morgane"},{"family":"Rathelot","given":"Roland"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2016"]]},"accessed":{"date-parts":[["2018",3,17]]}}}],"schema":""} (Abrahao et al. 2017; Cui, Li, and Zhang 2016; Laouenan and Rathelot 2016). These systems have also played an important role in platforms’ responses to claims of discrimination, alongside the stronger regulation of user behavior, and an interactional design that downplays racial identifiers ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"6ZL7nRjj","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Murphy 2016)","plainCitation":"(Murphy 2016)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2812,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2812,"type":"article-journal","title":"Airbnb’s Work to Fight Discrimination and Build Inclusion","container-title":"Airbnb","source":"Google Scholar","URL":"","author":[{"family":"Murphy","given":"Laura W."}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2016"]]}}}],"schema":""} (Murphy 2016). However, it is unclear whether public reputation systems will be able to temper discriminatory behavior. One study has found that controlling for the information communicated through photos, the review scores of an Airbnb host had no effect on the listing’s price or the likelihood of a listing being booked ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"chJrediD","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Ert, Fleischer, and Magen 2016)","plainCitation":"(Ert, Fleischer, and Magen 2016)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2807,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2807,"type":"article-journal","title":"Trust and reputation in the sharing economy: The role of personal photos in Airbnb","container-title":"Tourism Management","page":"62-73","volume":"55","source":"CrossRef","DOI":"10.1016/j.tourman.2016.01.013","ISSN":"02615177","shortTitle":"Trust and reputation in the sharing economy","language":"en","author":[{"family":"Ert","given":"Eyal"},{"family":"Fleischer","given":"Aliza"},{"family":"Magen","given":"Nathan"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2016"]]}}}],"schema":""} (Ert, Fleischer, and Magen 2016). Our study of Airbnb ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"hsEiCRSI","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Cansoy and Schor 2018)","plainCitation":"(Cansoy and Schor 2018)"},"citationItems":[{"id":1055,"uris":["","",""],"uri":["","",""],"itemData":{"id":1055,"type":"article-journal","title":"Who Gets to Share in the “Sharing Economy”: Understanding the Patterns of Participation and Exchange in Airbnb","container-title":"Unpublished paper, Boston College","URL":"","note":"00000","author":[{"family":"Cansoy","given":"Mehmet"},{"family":"Schor","given":"Juliet B."}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2018"]]}}}],"schema":""} (Cansoy and Schor 2018), as well as Hannak et. al.’s work on TaskRabbit and Fiverr ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"iJUpKQds","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(2017)","plainCitation":"(2017)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"DOI":"10.1145/2998181.2998327","ISBN":"9781450343350","abstract":"In this paper, we study whether TaskRabbit, a prominent on- line freelance marketplace, is impacted by racial and gen- der bias. We collect all worker profiles from TaskRabbit to gather information about workers’ gender, race, customer reviews, ratings, and positions in search rankings. We find that gender and race are significantly correlated with worker evaluations, as well as the workers’ rank in search results. We hope that our study fuels more research on the presence and implications of discrimination in online environments","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Hannak","given":"Aniko","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Wagner","given":"Claudia","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Garcia","given":"David","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Mislove","given":"Alan","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Strohmaier","given":"Markus","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Wilson","given":"Christo","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Cscw '17","id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["2017"]]},"page":"1914-1933","title":"Bias in Online Freelance Marketplaces : Evidence from TaskRabbit","type":"article-journal"},"suppress-author":1}],"schema":""} (2017) indicates that the reviews system itself is biased against areas with higher concentrations of minority residents and minority producers, respectively. Taken together, these findings suggest that market-based and technocratic fixes to discrimination highlighted by the proponents of the sharing economy have not been very effective to date. Perhaps more importantly, these approaches have restricted the debate about discrimination in the sector to instances of person-to-person discrimination. However, as we have argued for the case of Airbnb ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"I2CuocNS","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Cansoy and Schor 2018)","plainCitation":"(Cansoy and Schor 2018)"},"citationItems":[{"id":1055,"uris":["","",""],"uri":["","",""],"itemData":{"id":1055,"type":"article-journal","title":"Who Gets to Share in the “Sharing Economy”: Understanding the Patterns of Participation and Exchange in Airbnb","container-title":"Unpublished paper, Boston College","URL":"","note":"00000","author":[{"family":"Cansoy","given":"Mehmet"},{"family":"Schor","given":"Juliet B."}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2018"]]}}}],"schema":""} (Cansoy and Schor 2018), structural inequalities in access to housing assets is an ongoing, major source of inequality that cannot be addressed by the existence of a platform, even if its barriers to entry are low. Regulatory contestationThe emergence of for-profit sharing economy platforms in urban areas has been the subject of significant public attention on account of their impact on housing, traffic, tax revenues, and the industries with which they compete. Some scholars have argued that the platforms should not be regulated by the state because they provide consumers with better access to information, empower them with reputational tools and self-regulate ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"4g2E3Qdm","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Koopman, Mitchell, and Thierer 2015)","plainCitation":"(Koopman, Mitchell, and Thierer 2015)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"DOI":"10.2139/ssrn.2535345","ISSN":"1556-5068","abstract":"The rise of the sharing economy has changed how many Americans commute, shop, vacation, and borrow. It has also disrupted long-established industries, from taxis to hotels, and has confounded policymakers. In particular, regulators are trying to determine how to apply many of the traditional “consumer protec- tion” regulations to these new and innovative firms. The key contribution of the sharing economy, however, is that it has overcome market imperfections with- out recourse to traditional forms of regulation. Continued application of these outmoded regulatory regimes is likely to harm consumers. We argue that the Internet, and the rapid growth of the sharing economy, alleviates the need for much of this top-down regulation, with these recent innovations likely doing a much better job of serving consumer needs. When market circumstances change dramatically—or when new technology or competition alleviates the need for regulation—then public policy should evolve and adapt to accom- modate these realities. 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However, the overwhelming response by academics, policy makers and activists has been in favor of greater oversight, especially of Uber and Airbnb. In the case of Airbnb, the primary focus has been on how the rise of short-term rentals affects the availability and price of long-term housing and the quality of neighborhoods and urban life. Local activists ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"9Ds1Wz4D","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Dougherty 2015)","plainCitation":"(Dougherty 2015)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2749,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2749,"type":"article-newspaper","title":"San Francisco Ballots Turn Up Anger Over the Technical Divide","container-title":"The New York Times","URL":"","author":[{"family":"Dougherty","given":"Conor"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2015",11,1]]}}}],"schema":""} (Dougherty 2015), municipal and state authorities ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"Gyd9nkJR","properties":{"formattedCitation":"{\\rtf (Isaac 2015; O\\uc0\\u8217{}Sullivan 2017)}","plainCitation":"(Isaac 2015; O’Sullivan 2017)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2753,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2753,"type":"article-newspaper","title":"Airbnb Releases Trove of New York City Home-Sharing Data","container-title":"The New York Times","publisher-place":"New York, NY","event-place":"New York, NY","URL":"","author":[{"family":"Isaac","given":"Mike"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2015",12,1]]}}},{"id":2757,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2757,"type":"article-newspaper","title":"AirBNB taxes , regulation in new House Bill","container-title":"The Boston Globe","URL":"","author":[{"family":"O'Sullivan","given":"Jim"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2017",1,30]]}}}],"schema":""} (Isaac 2015; O’Sullivan 2017) and researchers have voiced concerns that Airbnb and other short-term rental platforms are creating incentives for property owners to convert long-term rental properties to exclusively short-term use. This results in higher rental prices, potentially driving long-term residents out of urban centers and harming their communities.One analysis of third-party data on Airbnb activities ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"I4oeRxPp","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Stulberg 2016)","plainCitation":"(Stulberg 2016)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"URL":"","accessed":{"date-parts":[["2016","11","22"]]},"author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Stulberg","given":"Ariel","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"FiveThityEight","id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["2016"]]},"title":"Airbnb Probably Isn’t Driving Rents Up Much, At Least Not Yet","type":"webpage"}}],"schema":""} (Stulberg 2016) has argued that the number of units converted to exclusive short-term rentals is too small to have a significant impact on the housing market. However, an increasing number of studies have found that Airbnb listings are not equally distributed across the urban landscape and in areas with high concentrations of listings, there can be a significant impact. Lee ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"wL4Lvnyv","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Lee 2016)","plainCitation":"(Lee 2016)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Lee","given":"Dayne","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Harvard Law & Policy Review","id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["2016"]]},"page":"229-255","title":"How Airbnb Short-Term Rentals Exacerbate Los Angeles's Affordable Housing Crisis: Analysis and Policy Recommendations","type":"article-journal","volume":"10"}}],"schema":""} (Lee 2016) found that in 2014, almost half of all Airbnb listings in Los Angeles were concentrated in just seven neighborhoods. With Airbnb listings making up between 3% and 12.5% of the housing stock in these areas, he argues that the short-term rentals play an important role in the rapid rise of housing prices in these neighborhoods. Wachsmuth and Weisler ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"kaU9ofMF","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Wachsmuth and Weisler 2018)","plainCitation":"(Wachsmuth and Weisler 2018)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2759,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2759,"type":"article-journal","title":"Airbnb and the Rent Gap: Gentrification Through the Sharing Economy","container-title":"Environment and Planning A","volume":"forthcoming","source":"Google Scholar","shortTitle":"Airbnb and the Rent Gap","author":[{"family":"Wachsmuth","given":"David"},{"family":"Weisler","given":"Alexander"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2018"]]}}}],"schema":""} (Wachsmuth and Weisler 2018) have recently presented a similar analysis for New York in 2016, showing how the concentration of Airbnb listings in specific areas, coupled with high revenues for short-term rentals, created strong pressures on local housing markets. A study by Barron, Kung and Proserpio ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"dptnwFMr","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Barron, Kung, and Proserpio 2017)","plainCitation":"(Barron, Kung, and Proserpio 2017)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2689,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2689,"type":"article-journal","title":"The Sharing Economy and Housing Affordability: Evidence from Airbnb","container-title":"Working paper","source":"Google Scholar","URL":"","shortTitle":"The Sharing Economy and Housing Affordability","author":[{"family":"Barron","given":"Kyle"},{"family":"Kung","given":"Edward"},{"family":"Proserpio","given":"Davide"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2017"]]}}}],"schema":""} (Barron, Kung, and Proserpio 2017) reports a similar relationship across the U.S., finding that higher numbers of Airbnb listings in an area are associated with higher rents and higher house prices, and that this association may be caused by property owners converting long-term housing to short-term housing. While these concerns have resulted in local organizing, and action by municipal authorities, it is not yet clear how effective these attempts will be. Regulation has often taken the form of restricting the number of days a unit can be rented, or requiring property owners to obtain permits to engage in short-term rentals. However, authorities have faced significant hurdles in enforcing these regulations ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"NHRYqaNU","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Walters 2017)","plainCitation":"(Walters 2017)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2762,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2762,"type":"article-newspaper","title":"Something in the Airbnb hosts anxious as New York begins crackdown","container-title":"The Guardian","URL":"","author":[{"family":"Walters","given":"Joanna"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2017",2,12]]}}}],"schema":""} (Walters 2017). Over the last few years, the platforms have also begun to collect hotel taxes for municipal authorities, which reduces incentives to take firmer action against short-term rentals. A ballot measure aimed at strengthening short-term rental regulations in San Francisco in 2015 was defeated, with Airbnb in its opposition campaign highlighting the amount of taxes it collected on behalf of the city ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"f8NUkzTb","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Romney, Lien, and Hamilton 2015)","plainCitation":"(Romney, Lien, and Hamilton 2015)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2764,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2764,"type":"article-newspaper","title":"Airbnb wins the vote in San Francisco, but city's housing debate rages on","container-title":"Los Angeles Times","URL":"","author":[{"family":"Romney","given":"Lee"},{"family":"Lien","given":"Tracey"},{"family":"Hamilton","given":"Matt"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2015",11,4]]}}}],"schema":""} (Romney, Lien, and Hamilton 2015). However, in January 2018 stronger regulations did come into effect which halved the number of legal rentals. If the city is able to enforce these new regulations, many of the adverse effects that housing activists have identified will be mitigated ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"DnLPkSv7","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Dent 2018)","plainCitation":"(Dent 2018)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2766,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2766,"type":"article-newspaper","title":"Airbnb cuts half of San Francisco listings as new laws kick in","container-title":"Endgadget","URL":"","author":[{"family":"Dent","given":"Steve"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2018",1,19]]},"accessed":{"date-parts":[["2018",3,17]]}}}],"schema":""} (Dent 2018). Regulations have also been put into place in other areas. New York State passed a law in 2016 that made most Airbnb and other short term rentals illegal unless the host is present. In 2018 Boston began a process of putting in a similar ordinance. In Los Angeles, short term rentals are illegal, however the regulation has not been enforced. In early 2018 the City Council was considering regulation that would legalize listings of primary homes only and for only 180 days per year. If these various regulatory efforts are successful, their bans on absent hosts will dramatically reduce the number of listings, exclude commercial operators from the market, and return lodging platforms to their origins as facilitators of “accommodating sharing.” However, so far illegal actors have found ways of returning to the platforms. Whether the latest round of regulations will be able to prevent that remains to be seen. One difference is that Airbnb finally appears to be cooperating with regulators, and will likely be able to ban commercial operators if it wants to.In the case of Uber, the ongoing conflict over regulation has focused on two major areas – their access to the urban transportation market alongside conventional taxis and the classification of drivers on the platform. Uber and other ridesharing apps have generally entered urban markets in the absence of regulatory approval and with considerable political clout. Indeed, it was revealed in early 2017 that Uber had been making use of software tools of questionable legality to avoid agents of regulatory bodies in many municipalities ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"LV1BpUQk","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Isaac 2017)","plainCitation":"(Isaac 2017)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2755,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2755,"type":"article-newspaper","title":"How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide","container-title":"The New York Times","publisher-place":"New York, NY","event-place":"New York, NY","URL":"","author":[{"family":"Isaac","given":"Mike"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2017",3,3]]}}}],"schema":""} (Isaac 2017). Uber’s growth has resulted in significant upheaval within these markets, because an Uber driver can operate without purchasing a taxi medallion, commercial insurance, or a vehicle that conforms to municipal regulations. While the first years of Uber’s market presence didn’t seem to have hurt medallion prices, medallion values in New York have fallen from an all-time high of 1.3 million dollars in 2014 to under $200,000 by late 2017 ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"j3YHo8GP","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Sernovitz 2017)","plainCitation":"(Sernovitz 2017)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2768,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2768,"type":"article-newspaper","title":"Sernovitz - 2017 - Are New York Taxis Such a Bad Investment The New Yorker.pdf","container-title":"The New Yorker","URL":"","author":[{"family":"Sernovitz","given":"Gary"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2017",7,17]]}}}],"schema":""} (Sernovitz 2017). Similar problems, at a smaller scale, plague the conventional taxi industries in many cities. Taxi operators and medallion owners have frequently protested against authorities allowing Uber and other ridehailing apps to operate without medallions. In response, regulators have announced changes to the medallion system to rescue medallion prices ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"gdbjdhdw","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Hu 2017)","plainCitation":"(Hu 2017)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2770,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2770,"type":"article-newspaper","title":"Taxi Medallions, Once a Safe Investment, Now Drag Owners Into Debt","container-title":"The New York Times","URL":"","author":[{"family":"Hu","given":"Winnie"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2017",9,10]]}}}],"schema":""} (Hu 2017) and refinance medallion-related debt ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"nEdsRI6g","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Gray 2017)","plainCitation":"(Gray 2017)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"URL":"","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Gray","given":"Alistair","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Financial Times","id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["2017"]]},"page":"10-11","title":"Uber’s rise triggers financial crisis at taxi lenders","type":"webpage"}}],"schema":""} (Gray 2017). However, regulatory action against ridehailing apps or drivers has been infrequent and inconsistent. One meaningful instance of regulatory action was undertaken against the ridehailing platforms by the city of Austin in 2015, when the city council passed regulations that mandated the ridehailing companies to share some of the data they collected, as well as requiring their drivers to undergo a background check using their fingerprints ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"1Lbh3c9s","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(McPhate 2016)","plainCitation":"(McPhate 2016)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2774,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2774,"type":"article-newspaper","title":"Uber and Lyft End Rides in Austin to Protest Fingerprint Background Checks","container-title":"The New York Times","URL":"","author":[{"family":"McPhate","given":"Mike"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2016",5,9]]}}}],"schema":""} (McPhate 2016). In response, both Uber and Lyft ended their operations in the city for a year, until legislation at the state level ended the fingerprint requirement ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"i2eQ2NTf","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Vertuno 2017)","plainCitation":"(Vertuno 2017)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"URL":"","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Vertuno","given":"Jim","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Associated Press","id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["2017"]]},"page":"1-6","title":"With new law , Lyft , Uber set to return to Texas capital city","type":"webpage"}}],"schema":""} (Vertuno 2017). Despite the lack of meaningful regulation of ridehailing, Gabel ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"P94oAsu5","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Gabel 2016)","plainCitation":"(Gabel 2016)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"DOI":"10.1080/00213624.2016.1179060","ISSN":"1946326X","abstract":"Entry into the taxi industry involves few risks. Entrants have lower costs than the incumbents, sunk costs are small, and modern technology makes it easy to hail a cab using the Internet. Despite large scale entry and low barriers to entry, monopoly power persists. The persistence of monopoly power illustrates that new technologies may not quickly eviscerate monopoly power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Gabel","given":"David","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Journal of Economic Issues","id":"ITEM-1","issue":"2","issued":{"date-parts":[["2016"]]},"page":"527-534","title":"Uber and the Persistence of Market Power","type":"article-journal","volume":"50"}}],"schema":""} (Gabel 2016) has argued that the taxi industry is still able to hold onto some market power, because they effectively monopolize curbside hailing, dedicated pick-up spots in public spaces like airports and segments of the population that do not use smartphones. It is unclear if these monopolies can be maintained, and whether they will be enough to protect the existence of a highly regulated medallion taxi sector alongside a largely unregulated ridehailing one. However the bigger regulatory challenge for the sector today is about the classification of its drivers Since their inception, the platforms have depended on classifying the drivers as independent contractors, and using terms like “driver-partner” ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"NNvAi1EE","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Hall and Krueger 2016)","plainCitation":"(Hall and Krueger 2016)"},"citationItems":[{"id":447,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":447,"type":"article-journal","title":"An Analysis of the Labor Market for Uber's Driver-Partners in the United States","container-title":"NBER Working Paper","issue":"22843","URL":"","author":[{"family":"Hall","given":"Jonathan"},{"family":"Krueger","given":"Alan B."}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2016"]]}}}],"schema":""} (Hall and Krueger 2016) in order to highlight the lack of an employment relationship. However, this classification has received significant pushback, both from drivers and local regulators that have been sympathetic to such demands. Perhaps the best known example of this struggle over classification is a class-action lawsuit filed in 2013 by a group of drivers in California (later joined by drivers from Massachusetts), which alleged that the drivers should be classified as employees, and are owed back pay, benefits and expense reimbursements ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"bD2IpdPw","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Isaac 2016)","plainCitation":"(Isaac 2016)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2754,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2754,"type":"article-newspaper","title":"Judge Overturns Uber’s Settlement With Drivers","container-title":"The New York Times","publisher-place":"New York, NY","event-place":"New York, NY","URL":"","author":[{"family":"Isaac","given":"Mike"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2016",8,18]]}}}],"schema":""} (Isaac 2016). While this case, and the legal question of classification, has attracted significant public and scholarly attention ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"xALjtw5T","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Acevedo 2016; Lobel 2017; Ross 2015; Dubal 2017)","plainCitation":"(Acevedo 2016; Lobel 2017; Ross 2015; Dubal 2017)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2780,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2780,"type":"article-journal","title":"Regulating employment relationships in the sharing economy","container-title":"Emp. Rts. & Emp. Pol'y J.","page":"1","volume":"20","source":"Google Scholar","author":[{"family":"Acevedo","given":"Deepa Das"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2016"]]}}},{"id":"ITEM-2","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"DOI":"10.3366/ajicl.2011.0005","ISBN":"1250692210","ISSN":"02729490","PMID":"21675331","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Lobel","given":"Orly","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"U.S.F. L. Rev.","id":"ITEM-2","issued":{"date-parts":[["2017"]]},"page":"51-74","title":"The Gig Economy & the Future of Employment and Labor Law","type":"article-journal","volume":"51"}},{"id":"ITEM-3","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Ross","given":"Henry","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Washington Law Review","id":"ITEM-3","issued":{"date-parts":[["2015"]]},"page":"1431-1469","title":"Ridesharing's House of Cards: O'Connor v. Uber Technologies Inc. and the Viability of Uber's Labor Model in Washington","type":"article-journal","volume":"90"}},{"id":718,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":718,"type":"article-journal","title":"Wage-Slave or Entrepreneur? Contesting the Dualism of Legal Worker Categories","container-title":"California Law Review","page":"65-126","volume":"105","author":[{"family":"Dubal","given":"Veena"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2017",2,1]]}}}],"schema":""} (Acevedo 2016; Lobel 2017; Ross 2015; Dubal 2017), there has also been a strong movement towards unionization among drivers. In Seattle, this movement has been helped along by a law that mandated ridehailing companies to enter into collective bargaining agreements with a union representing drivers ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"06Cn57ja","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Johnson 2017)","plainCitation":"(Johnson 2017)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2786,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2786,"type":"article-newspaper","title":"Judge Refuses to Block Seattle Uber, Lyft Driver Union Law","container-title":"US News","URL":"","author":[{"family":"Johnson","given":"Gene"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2017",8,25]]}}}],"schema":""} (Johnson 2017). In New York, Uber drivers are represented by a “guild” recognized by Uber. However, there are questions about the independence and the legality of this organization, because it is funded by Uber itself ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"xyR63IUT","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Scheiber 2017)","plainCitation":"(Scheiber 2017)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2536,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2536,"type":"article-newspaper","title":"How Uber Uses Psychological Tricks to Push Its Drivers’ Buttons","container-title":"The New York Times","source":"","abstract":"The start-up has undertaken an extraordinary experiment in behavioral science to subtly entice an independent work force to maximize company revenue.","URL":"","ISSN":"0362-4331","note":"00000","author":[{"family":"Scheiber","given":"Noam"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2017",4,2]]},"accessed":{"date-parts":[["2017",4,10]]}}}],"schema":""} (Scheiber 2017). Meanwhile the classification debate shows no signs of abating, and multiple lawsuits, sometimes with contradictory outcomes, are making their way through the court systems in several jurisdictions. Harris and Krueger ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"bzVzWlrW","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(2016)","plainCitation":"(2016)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Harris","given":"Seth D","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""},{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Krueger","given":"Alan B","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"Perspectives on Work","id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["2016"]]},"page":"30-33, 80","title":"Is your Uber driver an employee or an independent contractor","type":"article-journal","volume":"20"},"suppress-author":true}],"schema":""} (2016) have argued against legal solutions and in favor of establishing a new regulatory category with limited benefits. However, others have pushed back against this approach by refocusing the classification debate on the control exerted by the platforms ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"XKaNBIhu","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Cunningham-Parmeter 2016; Prassl and Risak 2016)","plainCitation":"(Cunningham-Parmeter 2016; Prassl and Risak 2016)"},"citationItems":[{"id":"ITEM-1","uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"DOI":"10.3366/ajicl.2011.0005","ISBN":"1250692210","ISSN":"02729490","PMID":"21675331","author":[{"dropping-particle":"","family":"Cunningham-Parmeter","given":"Keith","non-dropping-particle":"","parse-names":false,"suffix":""}],"container-title":"B.U. L. Rev.","id":"ITEM-1","issued":{"date-parts":[["2016"]]},"page":"1673-1728","title":"From Amazon to Uber: Defining Employment in the Modern Economy","type":"article-journal","volume":"96"}},{"id":2794,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2794,"type":"article-journal","title":"Uber, Taskrabbit, and Co.: Platforms as Employers-Rethinking the Legal Analysis of Crowdwork","container-title":"Comp. Lab. L. & Pol'y J.","page":"619","volume":"37","source":"Google Scholar","shortTitle":"Uber, Taskrabbit, and Co.","author":[{"family":"Prassl","given":"Jeremias"},{"family":"Risak","given":"Martin"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2016"]]}}}],"schema":""} (Cunningham-Parmeter 2016; Prassl and Risak 2016). A new regulatory category represents a step backwards for workers, and in any case such a shift is highly unlikely under the current Administration. A longterm analyst of this sector, Veena Dubal, is pessimistic that significant progress to protect Uber workers is likely, on any front. ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"Bs15je69","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Collier, Dubal, and Carter 2017)","plainCitation":"(Collier, Dubal, and Carter 2017)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2797,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2797,"type":"article-journal","title":"Labor Platforms and Gig Work: The Failure to Regulate","container-title":"IRLE Working Paper","volume":"106","issue":"17","source":"Google Scholar","URL":"","shortTitle":"Labor Platforms and Gig Work","author":[{"family":"Collier","given":"Ruth Berins"},{"family":"Dubal","given":"V. B."},{"family":"Carter","given":"Christopher"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2017"]]}}}],"schema":""} (Collier, Dubal, and Carter 2017). An optimistic view of regulation comes from by Rauch and Schelicher ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"kgvOyEPF","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(2015)","plainCitation":"(2015)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2799,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2799,"type":"article-journal","title":"Like uber, but for local government law: The future of local regulation of the sharing economy","container-title":"Ohio St. LJ","page":"901","volume":"76","source":"Google Scholar","shortTitle":"Like uber, but for local government law","author":[{"family":"Rauch","given":"Daniel E."},{"family":"Schleicher","given":"David"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2015"]]}},"suppress-author":1}],"schema":""} (2015), who argue that there will be novel evolution as governments harness the platforms, or their technologies and business models, to deliver public services, enact economic redistribution and generate enough surplus in the sectors platforms operate to do away with the need for extensive regulation. We can see some movement in this direction. Some municipalities in the US have experimented with limited subsidies to the ridehailing apps to enhance their public transit systems ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"mx1A83gi","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Dungca 2016)","plainCitation":"(Dungca 2016)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2801,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2801,"type":"article-newspaper","title":"MBTA to subsidize Uber, Lyft rides for customers with disabilities","container-title":"The Boston Globe","URL":"","author":[{"family":"Dungca","given":"Nicole"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2016",9,16]]}}}],"schema":""} (Dungca 2016). A few are subsidizing platforms to replace public transit services ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"G94LTfpp","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Jenkins 2018)","plainCitation":"(Jenkins 2018)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2803,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2803,"type":"article-newspaper","title":"This City In Texas Is Replacing All of Its Public Buses With $ 3 Via Rides","container-title":"Travel and Leisure","URL":"","author":[{"family":"Jenkins","given":"Aric"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2018",3,13]]}}}],"schema":""} (Jenkins 2018). Revenues from taxes on ridehailing are being used to fund infrastructure. Airbnb has mobilized its hosts to house refugees in Europe and evacuees in the US, proving the some viability of its model for emergency management ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"roVmFWJL","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Shen 2017)","plainCitation":"(Shen 2017)"},"citationItems":[{"id":2810,"uris":[""],"uri":[""],"itemData":{"id":2810,"type":"article-newspaper","title":"Airbnb Offers Free Homes to Hurricane Irma Evacuees","container-title":"Fortune","URL":"","author":[{"family":"Shen","given":"Lucinda"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2017"]]}}}],"schema":""} (Shen 2017). However, these developments do not reduce the urgent need for better and clear regulation of the for-profit sharing economy or begin to tackle the difficult task of doing so. We are more optimistic about the possibility of adequate regulation in Europe than the U.S., where the political power of the big platforms remains formidable.Concluding ThoughtsWe began this chapter by noting that the emergence of the “sharing economy” has engendered considerable debate. Critics have assailed platform companies for their treatment of labor, impacts on the supply and price of urban housing, and toleration of racial discrimination. Additional concerns center on how monetizing household assets may change the culture of everyday life, leading to a hyper-commodification of social relations. While the existing literature on these issues remains limited, we attempted to shed light on a number of these debates, with an emphasis on those most closely connected to consumption. A key finding in our research is that consumers and providers (especially outside of the ridehailing segment), see their activities in this sector as contributing to a new type of economic exchange. They are engaged in moral projects that are based on personal relations, trust, and autonomy. They feel that even the big platforms are alternatives to global companies that lack accountability, transparency and ethics. They part company with critics who see the platform economy as the latest leading edge of neo-liberalism. Yet there is mounting evidence that on a number of grounds—discrimination, exploitation of workers, housing supply—the critics have a point. Even as they are offering new, more personalized ways to make and save money, the platforms are also responsible for a variety of adverse effects. The non-profits, which rarely have negative impacts, have failed to scale. They remain small and generally unable to compete with the large commercial companies.At the moment, these debates are hard to resolve, in large part because the sector is quite dynamic. Platforms change policies frequently. In some cases, such as Uber and Lyft, policy change is near-continuous. In others, such as TaskRabbit, there have been numerous “pivots,” or re-formulations of the business model and the basic operation of the site. For Airbnb, change has come from various quarters. In the early days, it consisted of social encounters via shared accommodation. Over time, hosts became more likely to vacate their premises, commercial operators flooded onto the site, and “entire home” listings came to dominate. As a result, political pushback in larger cities led to regulations that seem likely to exclude commercial operators and restrict absentee hosts. What looked like convergence to a business-as-usual lodging company may now be a case of returning to its more alternative roots. And yet it is premature to make firm conclusions.Another reason to expect continued change is that the current labor force is diverse, in terms of economic situations, motives and needs. We have found that platforms that work well for supplementary earners (currently the majority) may be unable to provide decent work and income for full-timers (Schor et al 2017). Will there be growing pressure for earners to put in longer hours? We know that ridehailing companies are already doing quite a bit to induce more work from their drivers. Airbnb has also attempted to entice hosts to book more nights. If supplementary earners become less numerous, will labor conditions become more exploitative? Is Uber the “canary in the coal mine”? Or is it an outlier—a predatory company that will be brought to heel by regulation and competition?In some ways, debates about the sharing economy have been as much about the future as the present. Proponents envision a world in which traditional employment has been eliminated, workers have autonomy and flexibility, and efficiency reigns. Critics also see platforms taking over, and developing unchecked market power over both workers and consumers. 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