Mergers and acquisitions within the sharing economy: Placing all the players on the board

Abstract

The sharing economy is changing the way customers perceive businesses and making traditional companies face new challenges. Many outmoded companies have decided to embrace these changes either by creating their own sharing platforms or by acquiring an already existing one. This paper is an initial attempt to shed light on the reasons behind mergers and acquisitions involving at least one sharing platform. We conduct an in-depth analysis of M&As over the period 2012–2019 with a sample of 108 operations, covering countries all around the world. Our analysis reveals how important and commonplace these operations are becoming, and how widely spread sharing platforms are. The paper also shows how traditional companies are dealing with these new competitors and how sharing companies need the specific knowledge provided by established companies with outmoded approaches.