Here’s a recap of yesterday’s keynote tutorial given by prof. Saif Benjaafar, based on his MSOM review paper Operations Management in the Age of the Sharing Economy: What Is Old and What Is New?. The paper described three “canonical” applications that have garnered much attention from the operations management community, and used these applications to highlight distinguishing features of sharing economy business models and to point out research questions that are new. The authors put in context some of the recent work on the sharing economy and to showcase the underlying modeling toolkit and identify opportunities for future research.

A way to classify the model of sharing economics is

  • Peer to peer resource sharing (LiquidSpace for office space, MachineryLink forfarm equipment, etc.)
  • On-demand service platforms (Uber)
  • On-demand rental networks (Halo Bike, ZipCar)

At the center of the stage of sharing economic is the platform - who mediate the matching of demand and supply of shared resources. Platform natually possess information advantage (in general) and pricing privileges over the individual participants. So as proposed in Saif’s talk, most research questions are raised in view of the platform, for example

  • How should a platform match demand and supply, especially when resources/individual preferences are heterogeneous?
  • Followingly, how should the price its services?
  • How much effort should the platform exert in reducing (or in certain way, maybe intentionally increases?) market friction into the sharing system.

These questions are more related to OM - revenue management! Notably, the last question (manipulating market friction) is more tricky and has some econ flavour.

For the market as a whole, questions are:

  • What is the impact on ownership and usage, consumer surplus and social welfare of the shared economic?
  • What is the impact on the environment, especially when there are negative externalities associated with either ownership or usage of the resource? (For example, cars).

What interest me is the part about how much friction should (and can) the platfrom place on the market. Saif’s focused introducing the socially responsible espect and OM-ly revenue maximizing researches, which is practical, but I would prefer a little bit more strategic. More nasty it is, more fun.