Operations Management in the Sharing Economy: Advances, Challenges, and Opportunities

The rapid growth of the sharing economy over the past decade has changed many industries in profound ways. The innovative business models that have emerged in the sharing economy present unique opportunities as well as challenges, which have attracted a significant amount of attention from researchers in the operations management field. In this paper, we discuss the advances, challenges, and opportunities for research on operations management in the sharing economy. We divide sharing economy into eight categories: Ride Sharing, Space Sharing, Bike Sharing, Vehicle Sharing, Group Buying, Crowdfunding, Freelancing, and Last-Mile Delivery. For each business category, we identify the gaps and current challenges in the existing literature, discuss emerging industry trends and research topics, and suggest several future research directions. Our goal is to stimulate discussion and ideas about future studies in this area.