EXPRESS: Governance in Global Sharing Economy Platforms: A Transaction Cost Perspective

Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) has been widely used in international marketing, particularly for foreign market entry and expansion. However, existing applications largely focus on traditional firms engaged in dyadic transactions and overlook the structurally distinct nature of sharing economy platforms such as Uber and Airbnb. Unlike traditional firms, these platforms operate through triadic exchanges that mediate interactions between crowdsourced providers and customers and are governed by algorithmic control over provider behavior. The proposed framework extends TCE to global sharing economy platforms by reexamining its behavioral assumptions, transaction attributes, and transaction costs. This framework incorporates multiplex opportunism and platform trust as behavioral assumptions; algorithmic specificity, multi-platform participation, regulatory complexity, and institutional uncertainty as transaction attributes; and ecosystem advantage and location-specific knowledge as contextual moderators. In addition, it identifies four specific transaction costs (i.e., onboarding, coordination, adaptation, and safeguarding) facing sharing economy platforms and/or providers. Illustrative evidence for this framework that highlights how these features shape platform-provider dynamics across international markets is provided via case studies of Uber and Airbnb’s international expansion activities. The paper concludes with a set of testable research propositions to guide future inquiries on the internationalization of sharing economy platforms and the governance of global crowdsourced ecosystems.