Professional Service Providers in the Sharing Economy

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 panel is Lene Pettersen, who begins by highlighting the rise of the sharing economy. In this economy, the key stakeholders are service providers, users, and intermediaries, and these may not necessarily represent traditional commercial actors. Professionals and small firms are now emerging that use sharing economy platforms to provide professional services.

Lene’s previous work interviewed platform providers such as Airbnb and Uber as well as smaller platforms, and the consumers and users of these platforms. Most of these platforms stated that they would also include professional service providers on their platforms – e.g. small-scale companies renting out multiple apartments via Airbnb. (As of 2016, Airbnb claimed that some 81% of hosts are private providers.)

However, this runs counter to the expectations of some of the consumers of these platforms, who use them explicitly to engage with private rather than professional providers; such expectations are especially pronounced the more ‘exotic’ or ‘authentic’ the experience offered is (e.g. an Airbnb flat in a faraway location). This is also because the level of possible complaining is different for privately or professionally provided services, and because of the person-to-person feedback and ratings models that sharing economy platforms typically provide.

These platforms depend on network effects for their success, which means a constant need to grow and scale up. This creates a push for continuous innovation, which may come especially from the ‘power sellers’, but to embrace them is a considerable risk as such power sellers can represent a considerable disruption to the platform’s community structure.