A Systematic Literature Review on Pricing Strategies in the Sharing Economy

Abstract

As an emerging business model, the sharing economy has gained a large amount of academic attention; the pricing problem in the sharing economy has also been widely investigated. Aiming to capture the current state-of-the-art research on pricing strategies in the sharing economy and foreseeing directions for future research, this article conducts a systematic literature review and content analysis of 158 articles from the Scopus and Web of Science databases. As a result, first, this review proposes an extended definition covering B2C and C2C models and a model structure covering the entire supply chain, based on which 158 articles are categorized into nine sub-models covering 30 scenarios. Second, the general characteristics (i.e., research fields, time and journal distributions, research themes and scenarios) and technical details (i.e., theories, methodologies, approaches, models, and conclusions) of the 158 articles are reviewed and summarized by the pricing party, business mode, and scenario. Finally, this review proposes some future research directions of existing scenarios from the perspectives of information asymmetry, market competition, and empirical approaches, and discusses some extensions, including uninvestigated scenarios and COVID-19-related topics; correspondingly, this review suggests some analytical models and empirical approaches that can be employed to fill these gaps. The proposed research directions and corresponding approaches can be references for future research.