ISyE Research on Peer-to-Peer Product Sharing Wins Best Paper Award in Service Management

A paper authored by an ISyE research team is the winner of the 2021 MSOM Service Management SIG Best Paper Award. The award is given to the best paper on service management published in the previous three years. The paper “Peer-to-Peer Product Sharing: Implications for Ownership, Usage, and Social Welfare in the Sharing Economy,” was published in the journal Management Science in 2019.

The paper describes a novel model of a platform that facilitates the peer-to-peer sharing of products. In doing so, the paper lays out the theoretical foundation for the analysis of interactions among owners, renters, and a matching platform. The paper captures salient features of a sharing economy such as heterogenous needs for usage among owners and non-owners, strategic decision making of consumers about owning or renting, within-side and across-side network effects, matching frictions, and the role of a platform in matching supply with demand. The analysis provided addresses the fundamental question of whether or not a sharing economy leads to more environmentally sustainable outcomes (e.g., more ownership or less and more usage or less) and who among consumers benefits the most from the availability of sharing.

The paper is authored by ISyE Professor Saif Benjaafar, former ISyE Professor Guangwen Kong (currently at Temple University), former ISyE doctoral student Xiang Li (currently at Amazon) and Costas Courcoubetis, a Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen.

The paper is listed as a “Highly Cited paper” by ISI Web of Science for “receiving enough citations to place it in the top 1% of the academic field of Economics and Business based on a highly cited threshold for the field and publication year” and has been cited more than 300 times on Google Scholar.

A link to the paper can be found on the INFORMS website and in a related blog post.