Ming Hu - Sharing Economy: Making Supply Meet Demand

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Sharing economy refers to a market model that enables and facilitates the sharing of access to goods and services. For example, Uber allows riders to share a car. Airbnb allows homeowners to share their extra rooms with renters. Groupon crowdsources demands, enabling customers to share the benefit of discounted goods and services, whereas Kickstarter crowdsources funds, enabling backers to fund a project jointly. Unlike the classic supply chain settings in which a firm makes inventory and supply decisions, in a sharing economy, supply is crowdsourced and can be modulated by a platform. The matching-supply-with-demand process in a sharing economy requires novel perspectives and tools to address challenges and identify opportunities.

This edited book examines the challenges and opportunities arising from todays sharing economy from an operations management perspective. Individual chapter authors present state-of-the-art research that examines the general impact of sharing economy on production and consumption, the intermediary role of a sharing platform, crowdsourcing management, and various context-based operational problems.

This book cannot exist without the strong commitment of our colleagues. I am grateful to each of the contributing authors for sharing their cutting-edge research with us. I would like to thank Professor Chris Tang, the editor of the Springer Series in Supply Chain Management, who has encouraged me to work on this book. I am grateful to Mirko Janc for typesetting each chapter exceptionally carefully and rigorously.

This work was financially supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [Grant RGPIN-2015-06757]; the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) [Grant No. 71772006]; the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto; and the program of Guanghua Thought Leadership at Guanghua School of Management, Peking University.