The Consumer Science of Sharing: A Discussant's Observations

This discussant's response to the collected articles on the consumer behavior of sharing draws on a 1983-99 record of research on the psychology of ownership and property. The major recommendations here are: (1) that sharing be defined as the simultaneous or sequential use of an object (e.g., car), a space (e.g., living room), or an intangible (e.g., identity) by more than one individual; (2) that sharing be better described and analyzed by the naive phenomenology methods used by Ichheiser, Heider, and Goffman; (3) that sharing arising from shared ownership be distinguished from sharing arising from an owner's prerogative to share; (4) that ownership be defined as social and legal protection of possessions for future utility in order to allow owners, as Litwinski theorized, to have relaxed expectations, in French, attente dans la détente; (5) that shopping and purchasing are inventory behaviors that are distinct from, and prior to, consumers' use of inventory; (6) that distributed inventory accessed by digitally mediated sharing (e.g., Uber) be examined as alternative inventory behavior; (7) that scholarship on the "sharing economy" better explore and exploit the literatures in the subfields of (a) ownership theory, (b) child development, (c) inventory management, and (d) competition theory.