| dc.description.abstract | In this honors thesis, I seek to build a definition of the sharing economy, a term still loaded with ambiguity in today's economic discourse, and so a valuable place to synthesize the vast amounts of research in related fields. By defining the sharing economy as "an economic system that is material in nature and built on networked peer-to-peer interactions that leverage weak-tie relationships to facilitate collaborative consumption, where individuals are both producers and consumers of information and attention as well as goods and services, and human action is facilitated by community formation through the sharing of information in order to reach specialized audiences or markets, and where these community economic interactions are characterized by combining intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for users," I am able to explore the ways in which sharing economies inadvertently encourage a more nuanced economic perspective, and at times serve as a complement to or challenge of traditional capitalism. To work through this definition, my analysis begins by addressing the scholarly conversation up to the present, outlining the theoretical framework that serves as a foundation for academic inquiry into these economies, and ending with a case study testing Airbnb to this definition of the online sharing economy. Individuals within the online home rental platform Airbnb act as attention economists where they skillfully filter information and create multimodal appeals to best direct attention towards their own listings. Airbnb serves as an excellent example of the strength of weak ties and the ability of sharing economies to encourage human coordination and allow individuals to leverage their own social networks for intrinsic and extrinsic gain, demonstrating a larger societal shift towards methods of collaborative consumption and peer production. | |
