Faculty News

Prof. Arun Sundararajan on the emergence of the sharing economy

Excerpt from Minnesota Public Radio -- "Some of these new sharing economy companies are sort of like the rental business on steroids. You used to rent a car for a day, now you can rent it for an hour. There are bike share programs where sort of a fleet of bikes is provided by the city, like in Minneapolis or CitiBike in New York City now, which has gained tremendous popularity over the last few months. But the more interesting models are actually the ones like airbnb and RelayRides where the sharing is person-to-person, so it's not a company that is providing a suite of apartments or a fleet of cars, it's individuals saying, well, if I own something that other people can use, here is a marketplace on which I can actually commercially lend it to them. So we're not creating a whole new set of assets that are then shared by people."

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