Mba 010 Week Assignment (Rev 2)

Part B (25 points)
This week you are to complete a FINAL response to the following questions. The class will be divided into groups so you and your peers may collaborate on Part B of this assignment. This final response will be evaluated on content as well as completeness and clarity.
“…profit-seeking firms create value for the owners, customers, and other stakeholders by continually driving the economy toward an ever more efficient allocation of resources.”
The Earth Institute at Columbia University hosted a roundtable on the Sharing Economy.  While there are significant sustainability implications of the sharing economy, these are only tangential to our interests.   I want you to watch the roundtable discussion, follow up by pursuing your own independent research, and then write approximately 500 words addressing the following.

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  What is meant by the “sharing economy”?
  
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  How does the sharing economy better allocate underutilized resources?
  
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  In so doing, how does it “create value”?
  

https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2017/10/26/the-sharing-economy-is-transforming-sustainability/
The sharing economy is taking the stuffs that we need for the rent instead of buying them. The idea is that many people find it more convenient to pay for a one-time use of a product than to own it all the time. The sharing economy makes it as easy as possible to exchange supply for demand, and therefore has high efficiency. As it turned out, in many cases it is more profitable for people not to own valuable items, for example, a car, but to pay only for the time it takes to actually use them. In contrast, those who have idle property have the opportunity to benefit from it.

Such services really save people time and money. The consumer chooses what is convenient and beneficial for him, therefore, the popularity of sharing is only growing.

Sharing Economy is based on saving time. The market may offer a lot, but in fact only the essentials survive. In the first place for a person is time saving - the greatest value for him.

Let's take a look at a modern metropolitan resident. In the morning he puts on a rented shirt. Then he drives a car-sharing car to work in the coworking space. After work, he returns to a rented apartment or apartment in a convenient area for him. Sitting on a rented couch, he strokes a rented cat. They will rent a dress and a smoking jacket with their fiancée and get married in a rented cottage. And all this for him is very convenient, economical and quite shareable.

Overall, the sharing economy creates value by providing access and intensifying the use of under-utilized assets. It does so through two principal value-creation mechanisms: 1. Peer-to-peer intermediation: some initiatives create value by organizing decentralized peer-to-peer transactions. Typically, these are sharing economy platforms (such as Airbnb) that connect peers through distributed, large-scale digital networks in order to organize decentralized production, distribution, and exchange of products and services. 2. Centralized resource pooling: some initiatives create value by creating and providing access to a centralized resource pool. This typically corresponds to “access-driven business models” or “product-service systems” where for-profit companies (such as ZipCar) create a centralized infrastructure that is accessible for short-term rental. This also corresponds to initiatives such as Wikipedia, where individual decentralized contributions are stored and aggregated in a central pool (the Wikipedia website) that is made freely available to users.