The sharing economy

Abstract

The sharing economy is an emergent field of scholarship. This review explores two clusters of debate regarding the sharing economy and seeks to discern the lines of a productive dialogue between them. It suggests that the current state of scholarship on law in the sharing economy is a complex and asymmetrical mix of narrative articulation and empirical exploration. The first cluster focuses on an on-demand commercial vision of the sharing economy and is generating an exploding legal literature largely not grounded on empirical research. This coexists with an emergent social science literature focused on a solidarity-inflected version of the sharing economy, which, however, pays little or no explicit attention to law or legality. Each cluster of debate is first separately explored, after which three sites of détente are identified where these trajectories edge toward each other: urban governance, sociolegal accounts of the interplay between enterprise diversity and regulation, and reconfigurations of property law. Common to all three is an appreciation of collective economic agency as of equal importance to regulatory responses.