Abstract
Great hopes have been placed in the sharing economy to provide a
new business model based on peer-to-peer (P2P) exchanges of underutilized
assets. As a model, the sharing economy has been expected to
make significant contributions to sustainability, providing new opportunities
for entrepreneurship, more sustainable use of resources, and consumer
co-operation in tight economic networks. However, in recent
years, digital platforms have turned into the most important actors in
the global sharing economy, turning global corporations, such as
AirBnB, Booking, or TripAdvisor into intermediaries controlling and profiting
from most transactions. Focused on accommodation, this paper
conceptualizes the sharing economy in comparison to the wider collaborative
economy, and discusses its social, economic, environmental, and
political impacts in comparison to the sustainable development goals. It
concludes that the sharing economy has great potential to make very
significant contributions to sustainability, though the model is increasingly
being replaced by the collaborative economy, which performs as
an extension and acceleration of neoliberal economic practices.