It seems that perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there’s nothing left to take away.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Welcome to this book!

By reading the table of contents, you have probably noticed the diversity of topics we are about to discuss. The purpose of the Sharing Economy and Big Data Analytics, as the title suggests, is to provide a good reference source in these two fields, which have emerged in the digital context. These two fields are so vast that a book ten times larger could not cover everything.

From a theoretical and practical point of view, this book adds new knowledge and expands the growing body of literature in the field of the Big Data-based sharing economy. It examines why the new data analysis techniques are needed for sharing economy companies.

These reasons are not only related to the implementation of advanced technologies, enabling the capture and the analysis of large amounts of available data, but also to the extraction of value to better guide, optimize the decision-making process and operationalize the company’s various activities.

These questions will be primarily based on the following points:

• – How did the different players give meaning to the concept of sharing? Or, in another way, how have they been able to develop their business models in a way that competes and/or coexists with existing models?
• – How is the value captured, created and delivered, and how is this value co-created in regard to the interaction of multi-purpose players in this sharing context? Or, how does the ecosystem of sharing logic work, and what are the impacts, as well as the economic, social and environmental challenges?
• – What is the role of Big Data and the set of data analysis techniques and algorithms in value creation in an economy based on sharing? How do these algorithms and new analytical techniques affect the ecosystem of the sharing economy?

The objective is to show the power of Big Data analytics and explain why it is so important for the sharing economy. Especially if we notice, thanks to the exploration carried out on the whole literature, that a few studies have simultaneously addressed these two fields. This is the full potential of this book, which will serve as a reference for readers in order to understand the role of Big Data analytics as a critical success factor for sharing economy companies.

This book therefore discusses the why and the how, in order to help the reader understand these two parallel universes. For each chapter, we have chosen a different aspect which we find interesting, while hoping that these aspects will serve as points of entry into these two exciting universes.

Soraya SEDKAOUI

Mounia KHELFAOUI

October 2019