Who Shares the Sharing Economy?

From its early days, the sharing economy was celebrated in utopian terms, as a platform for creating and sharing wealth across social divides. Sharing, it is often argued, facilitates improved wealth redistribution and a decentralized, equitable and sustainable economy, by providing a community-based economy of sharers. These idealistic sentiments, , are what we call the Sharing Economy Equalizing Myth. But is this myth true, or is it just a smoke screen that enables aggressive participants in the sharing economy to harness its features to their own benefit?

This Article “meta-analyzes” an extensive volume of hundreds of empirical findings that studied the socio-economic implications of the sharing economy. We focus on three distinct fields that are central to people’s life and wealth: labor, housing, and finance. We find that across a variety of markets, unequal outcomes are constantly prevalent. In fact, sharing economies impose great threats to both efficiency and fair distribution. We identify three implications of the sharing economy wherever it operates: (1) big or sophisticated stakeholders who take advantage of the regulatory system’s weaknesses; (2) uncontrolled discriminatory practices, and (3) negative externalities on the non-sharing, traditional, market.

We argue that these negative implications should be identified as a market failure in which the sharing economy operates. This market failure is a result of a structural regulatory arbitrage: the sharing economy incentivizes, and rewards sophisticated repeat players to exploit the weaknesses of the regulatory system.. In order to confront the market failure generated by the sharing economy, we argue that a conceptual regulatory shift must be adopted.