Why not to own rather than to share? A cross-sector analysis of consumption regime switch for the sharing economy

The purpose of the research is to shed light on sharing economy consumers post-sharing behaviour to understand whether using sharing platforms could actually lead to a regime switch in consumption. While extant literature has focused the attention on the drivers of sharing economy adoption and on how these drivers can determine satisfaction and repurchase intention, scant attention has been paid so far to the impact of sharing on traditional (ownership-over-access) consumption. The topic of a regime switch that could be caused by the sharing economy has been raised from some scholars (Fota et al., 2019), yet an ad hoc investigation is still missing. To this end, a quantitative analysis has been performed. Data has been collected through a self-administered questionnaire to a sample of 400 respondents. The questionnaire has been developed using scales coming from literature about sharing economy (Table 1). The constructs have been chosen following Fahmy (2019)’s identification of the key determinants of the regime switch that might happen because of the sharing economy: climate change, social connectedness, comunal consumption, economic and institutional reasons. The same questions have been repeated considering three key industries of the sharing economy: mobility, accommodation and goods (second hand).