Does sustainability affect consumer behavior in sharing economy? Insights from a literature review

The sharing economy takes off as an economic model based on cooperation, where exchanges happen among customers populating both the demand and the offer sides. This innovative paradigm is not only a different way to consume goods or services, but it represents a new lifestyle with altruistic values and social and environmental sustainability being the main drivers. As a peer-to-peer system, the relational aspect plays a key role and the mutual trust among customers has to be ensured as participants in the exchanges need to be reassured about the fact that the counterpart will not represent a potential risk. This extended abstract aims to present the results of a research project whose aim is twofold: to provide a literature review about consumer behaviour in sharing economy and to explore the role of sustainability along the phases of the purchasing funnel to gauge its impact in orienting each of them. The purchasing funnel concept refers to the steps consumers made in the consumption process, and it sums up all the passages from the identification of the need to the expression of the final (dis)satisfaction. From a theoretical perspective it has been widely addressed from scholars and practitioners. Among the existing contributions, Kotler (2017) Page 1 (5) defines the 5As model: aware, appeal, ask, act and advocate. In the aware phase consumers acquire knowledge about the product or the brand thanks to the marketing initiatives or the word-of-mouth. In the appeal phase consumers evaluate whether the product would be a possible solution for their needs. In the ask phase consumers are prone to the product and actively involved in finding the proper information about it to understand its potential benefits and risks. In the act phase consumers actually buy the product. In the advocate phase consumers are able to evaluate whether their expectations have been met and, consistently, their intention to buy the product again and recommend it to others. The decision to explore this process in the sharing economy and to propose a literature review, arises from the growing number of contributions about sharing customers on the one hand, and the lack of a systematization of those on the other. Existing reviews are in fact focused on the general phenomenon of the sharing economy. As for the second purpose, sustainability has been considered as a key trait of the sharing economy business models as it is inherent in the very concept of sharing and in the mission of giving new life to idle resources through their redistribution (Ranjabari et al., 2018). As studies about sharing consumers often refer to sustainability as a key element of the process, this work aims to identify which are the phases of the purchasing process in which it influences consumers the most.