Participation in collaborative consumption -a value co-creation perspective

In recent years, the phenomenon of sharing economy has emerged in many industries worldwide and businesses leveraging the sharing economy have flourished. Sharing Economy denotes the “collaborative consumption made by the activities of sharing, exchanging, and rental of resources without owning the goods”. Value is a central concept in consumer behavior and it directly explains why consumers choose to buy or avoid particular products or services. Therefore, to establish the theoretical linkage between collaborative consumption and consumer value, our study propose a research model to explain why consumers participate in collaborative consumption from a value co-creation perspective. Based prior literature on collaborative consumption and literature on consumer value and value co-creation, we identify five factors as key determinants of attitude towards collaborative consumption, including economic value, social value, entertainment value, convenience value, and trust. A large scale survey was designed and implemented to test our research model. Data analysis results suggested that economic value, social value, entertainment value and trust significantly affect people’s attitude towards collaborative consumption. The practical and theoretical contributions of our study are discussed.