B2C Relationship Quality in the Sharing Economy in the Chinese Context

摘要

The sharing economy is a means of sharing goods, services, ideas, information, and skills through a network of individuals, facilitated through social networks via computers and mobile apps. This has been described by Botsman and Rogers [1], and a socioeconomic model is emerging, based on sharing, renting, gifting, bartering, swapping, lending, and borrowing [1,2]. The sharing economy is booming and, with the consumer's value changed, access has become more popular than ownership recently, so the sharing economy still has huge potential for penetration. There are many data showing faster development in some industries. For instance, in bicycle sharing, there were 400,000 public city bikes available in the world in 2012. The car sharing market was worth USD 100 billion in 2010, and it was estimated that it would be worth USD 3.3 billion by 2016 in North America alone [3]. The sharing economy was introduced in China in 2003. By 2008 it was just starting to grow and after 2013 it started to rocket. In 2016 the turnover in the sharing economy reached RMB 3452 billion in China—an increase of 103% in comparison with 2015.