Bright and dark sides of adopting a platform‐based sharing economy business model

Abstract

The sharing economy is primarily a socio‐economic concept that is built upon organizations sharing resources between each other. It includes sharing a single platform by multiple organizations. These organizations can be rivals competing in the same marketplace. Often, organizations can share their employees, data, and other resources. Although there are multiple benefits in a platform‐based sharing economy business model, there are some ethical concerns, too. Limited studies have extensively investigated how adopting a platform‐based sharing economy business model could provide both opportunities and challenges impacting the intention of the organizations to adopt this model. From such a perspective, this study aims at an in‐depth investigation of employees' perceptions regarding the intention of adopting sharing economy models through which organizations could enjoy various benefits that overcome the risks. With the help of a resource‐based view with other theories and the extant literature, a conceptual model has been developed, which later has been validated using the PLS–SEM technique considering 376 responses from different organizations in India. This study has demonstrated how the benefits derived from adopting a platform‐based sharing economy business model overcome the risks involved and could motivate organizations to intend to adopt such a business model.