Study: The Consumer Potential of Collaborative Consumption

The collaborative consumption space has grown rapidly over the past years—and further growth is expected. Few projections, however, have been made on the future growth potential, despite its relevance to entrepreneurship, policy, law, media, and business. To fill this gap, ShareNL developed a survey based on previous research, which measures consumers’ willingness to take part in various examples of collaborative consumption. The survey covers a wide variety of uses for collaborative consumption (household goods, cars, rides, meals, gardens, accommodation, and skills) as well as modes of exchanges (buying, selling, renting, lending, giving, receiving, and swapping).

The questionnaire was completed by 1,330 Amsterdam citizens—96% of whom had never taken part in collaborative consumption, and 99% of whom are 35 years or older. The overall results indicate that 43.8% would take part as a consumer, and 31.9% as a provider. From all respondents, 84.1% would take part in at least one example of collaborative consumption. [Results per example are provided in the table below.] Furthermore the instrument measures a range of motives, other factors and demographics that explain why people would participate in collaborative consumption. These motives will be described in a series of posts on this site over the coming weeks.

The main conclusion of the thesis is that collaborative consumption has a substantial consumer potential which is in no way confined to only digitally savvy millennials. There are people from different demographic groups willing to take part, for a large variety of motives. Above all, they can choose from an incredible variety of platforms. Indeed, from a consumer behaviour perspective, these findings indicate that the transition to a new socioeconomic groundswell of collaborative consumption is taking place and is likely to gain even more momentum over the next years.

This master thesis research project is a collaboration between shareNL, Collaborative Lab, the Department for Research and Statistics of Amsterdam (O+S) and Utrecht University. The complete thesis is available in the resources section of this website.