Browsing by Subject "Sharing economy"

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Managing Share Economy : positive und negative Auswirkungen bei der Einführung von Access-Based Services
(2019) Lehr, Adrian Marinus; Büttgen, Marion
In the last few years, services that allow consumers to use goods for short time periods have gained considerable relevance (Baumeister et al. 2015; Bert et al. 2016). This phenomenon is known as sharing or share economy (Wallenstein 2016) and follows the principles of borrowing, renting, bartering and sharing, and focuses in particular on collaborative consumption (Botsman and Rogers 2010). This dissertation project is focused on access-based consumption or access-based services (Schaefers et al. 2016). These services are defined as "market-mediated transactions that provide customers with temporally limited access to goods in return for an access fee, while the legal ownership remains with the service provider". A common practical example is car sharing. Starting from the main drivers of this trend towards non-ownership-oriented forms of consumption, this dissertation addresses the positive and negative effects for companies that want to move into this sector. Based on a systematic literature review, the thesis identifies several important research gaps in this emerging field. This dissertation project makes several important contributions to the research to close these gaps. The thesis examines three central research questions. A first research question addresses the impact of the development towards service-oriented business models of the so-called access-based services for manufacturing companies. This work shows in detail which customer-side effects arise from the use of access-based services with regard to the product or brand used. The role that access-based services can play in the adoption and diffusion of new products is also highlighted. Furthermore to these positive effects, this dissertation project also addresses the issue that in many cases the introduction of access-based services does not lead to the intended commercial success. Thus, this research examines the question which features and characteristics an access service must have in order to be accepted by the customer. This also shows that these offers result in a cost-intensive operation. The third question of this dissertation is dedicated to the issue that companies try to establish themselves in this new market through a communicative positioning of less innovative, more classical rental concepts as sharing offers. For this purpose, the concept of sharewashing on the basis of established greenwashing is introduced within this dissertation project. Thus, one of the objectives of the thesis is to examine the effects of such a misleading approach. The results show that such sharewashing leads to a loss of customer acceptance. Thus, this work also contributes to the research stream of marketing ethics. In summary, the present work addresses different, but interdependent questions in the field of access-based services. To answer the questions, several theoretical concepts (information integration theory, attribution theory, adoption theory) and research streams (innovation, trial, consumer skepticism) were referred to, which were also extended within this work. A longitudinal field study, a field study including company data, a qualitative study, a factorial survey design and two experiments were applied. This dissertation thus makes comprehensive contributions by demonstrating how and under what conditions corporate behavior within the access-based services market can lead to positive, but also possible negative effects for companies.
Understanding social-psychological determinants and effects of collaborative consumption
(2017) Roos, Daniel; Hahn, Rüdiger
This doctoral thesis aims to define collaborative consumption and advance the understanding of its social-psychological determinants and effects. In order to achieve these aims, the thesis presents three studies, each of which has been accepted at scientific conferences and developed further based on feedback from experts and reviewers. Two of the studies have been published in peer-reviewed journals. The introduction provides an overview of collaborative consumption as a comparably sustainable consumption practice. Moreover, three research deficits are identified that are the motivation for the subsequent studies. First, it is shown that the basic idea and the scope of collaborative consumption remain unclear. Second, it is found that understanding of determinants is limited to isolated variables leaving relative strengths of and interdependencies between variables untapped Finally, it is assessed that actual effects of collaborative consumption on consumers’ mindsets are not well understood. The first study titled “Prototypical collaborative consumption behaviors and their relations: A conceptual review and empirical study” examines consumer behaviors that are comprised by the term “collaborative consumption” and the relations between these behaviors. In order to identify prototypical collaborative consumption behaviors, original definitions of collaborative consumption in the literature are reviewed. To derive hypotheses on the relationships between the prototypical behaviors, the study draws on theoretical foundations from the field of consumer lifestyles and behavioral spillover. The second study titled “Understanding collaborative consumption: An extension of the theory of planned behavior with value-based personal norms” aims to understand which social-psychological variables and underlying values and beliefs determine actual collaborative consumption. The theory of planned behavior is used as the primary theoretical framework, as it is a well-established model that has been shown to explain a wide range of consumer behaviors. However, reviews and meta-analyses have found the theory’s ability to account for normative motives to perform a behavior is weak and have called for further theory development. As normative motives are expected to be particularly important in the context of collaborative consumption, the theory is extended with a value-based personal norm variable. The third study titled “Does collaborative consumption affect consumers’ values, attitudes, and norms? A panel study” examines the nature of causality between collaborative consumption and behavioral factors in order to determine whether collaborative consumption affects consumers’ values, attitudes, and norms over time. The study primarily builds on the theory of planned behavior, value theory, and the value-belief-norm theory to determine the theoretical framework linking collaborative consumption, values, attitudes, and norms over time. The theoretical framework is tested based on a two-wave panel over a time period of nine months using survey data from 168 consumers. In conclusion, the thesis contributes to the literature in six ways. First, the thesis conceptually defines collaborative consumption, a term that was used ambiguously so far. Second, it empirically advances the understanding of social-psychological determinants of collaborative consumption. Third, it explains social-psychological effects of collaborative consumption on consumers over time, something that has not been done in the literature before. Fourth, the thesis identifies and examines the relationships between five prototypical collaborative consumption behaviors. Fifth, it argues for the extension of the theory of planned behavior by a value-based personal norm variable and provides supporting empirical evidence. Finally, it advances knowledge on the causal relationship between values, attitudes, norms, and behavior.