Mrs. CHI Huihui, PhD candidate

Sous la direction de M. ZHOU Wei (ESCP Business School)

Facilitated by various online platforms, transaction costs of sharing and selling used products have become almost zero and this phenomenon has created new economic business form, competition and service. My research on the sharing economy can be considered from the four perspectives : consumers, providers, buisness models, and data policy. The consumer-based research investigates the temporal ownership boundary that exists in the sharing economy by considering the engagement duration, potential income and holding cost during the ownership. We decompose a merchandise as two substitute goods and find that there exists various conditions when this boundary may lean towards sharing, giving or reselling. The supplier-based research investigates the economic outcome of a monopolistic producer's self-competition between old and new generations of products. We consider a two-stage game in which a producer sells new products in the market in both stages and used products may enter the market in the form of shared and used goods in the second stage. We identify the market equilibrium of this two- stage game and provide managerial implications in different types of product markets that are represented by automobiles (with value depreciation) and real estates (with value appreciation). The business-model-based research studies the subscription contract provided by car manufacturers and studies the attractiveness of this new contract with discrete choice model. With the data collected from car manufacturers and rental platforms, we find that the subscription model has great potential to overrule the conventional methods of car ownership and holds a competitive advantage over car renting platforms. The data-policy-based research examines the data protection and privacy issue brought about by the sharing economy.