Operations Management in the Sharing Economy: An Integrated Perspective of Item-Sharing and Crowdshipping

Abstract

The uprising of the sharing economy yields a variety of new concepts on how members of a community can provide services to each other. Two of these concepts are item-sharing and crowdshipping. They have been implemented in practice in isolation so far but seem to complement each other well. We therefore propose the conceptual idea of an integrated platform on which user requests of both concepts are handled jointly. This paper revisits several studies that address the operations management of such a platform, including optimization models and methods for the corresponding decision making, and managerial insights derived from computational experiments. The results confirm that the two concepts are mutually beneficial and that a well-designed operations management allows to effectively serve demands announced on such a platform.