The Consumer Science of Sharing: A Discussant's Observations

Abstract

This discussant’s response to the collected articles on the consumer behavior of sharing draws on a 1983–99 record of research on the psychology of ownership and property. The major recommendations here are: (1) that sharing be defined as the simultaneous or sequential use of an object (e.g., car), a space (e.g., living room), or an intangible (e.g., identity) by more than one individual; (2) that sharing be better described and analyzed by the naive phenomenology methods used by Ichheiser, Heider, and Goffman; (3) that sharing arising from shared ownership be distinguished from sharing arising from an owner’s prerogative to share; (4) that ownership be defined as social and legal protection of possessions for future utility in order to allow owners, as Litwinski theorized, to have relaxed expectations, in French, <i>attente dans la détente</i>; (5) that shopping and purchasing are inventory behaviors that are distinct from, and prior to, consumers’ use of inventory; (6) that distributed inventory accessed by digitally mediated sharing (e.g., Uber) be examined as alternative inventory behavior; (7) that scholarship on the “sharing economy” better explore and exploit the literatures in the subfields of (a) ownership theory, (b) child development, (c) inventory management, and (d) competition theory.