Sharing Economy: Promote Its Potential to Sustainability by Regulation

The sharing economy is an emerging economic form with the potential to promote sustainable development; it is highly malleable but tends to not be environmentally friendly or necessarily lead to saving resources. Therefore, to give it the inherent logic of sustainable development and realize its great potential, the sharing economy must be made to meet the necessary conditions and be appropriately regulated in the current window of opportunity. This paper proposes that the potential factors of the sharing economy that can promote sustainable development are mainly improving resource utilization efficiency, market impetus and plasticity and transforming consumption patterns and concepts, while the main limiting factors are the excessive demand that is likely to result from to the descending consumption threshold, lack of maintenance motivation due to the sharing of property rights, and uncertainty in the proportions of increased welfare levels and resource consumption. Then, the paper explores the necessary conditions to promote sustainable development in the sharing economy, namely, the required characteristics of shared products and the need to place constraints on consumers. Next, it discusses how to incorporate these conditional factors into the regulatory framework for the future development of the sharing economy and proposes overall principles and ideas for the governance and regulation of producers, consumers, and platform operators in the operation of and participation in the sharing economy. Finally, the paper emphasizes that the line of regulatory thinking should change because the sharing economy differs from traditional economic forms, and it also emphasizes the importance of exploring conditions and explores the related research prospects for studying regulation with environmental sustainability as the regulatory objective.