4
The Collaborative Economy: What Are We Talking About?

Trade, at least in its commercial aspect, is a traditional form of cooperation between people, wherever and whoever they are. Inseparable from trade, business is its result: Phoenician and Greek sailors travelled the Mediterranean in search of precious resources such as lead, wood and wine, materials that they exchanged from their next stopover for spices or marble; for them, this already required cooperation with the traders they met at each port they call upon. Similarly, for millennia, the caravans that travelled the Asian silk roads bought and sold with those they found along the way, in Samarkand and elsewhere. From human memory, trade cannot therefore be dissociated from business, nor business from cooperation, since it has been verified throughout history that any trade implies cooperation between the parties. The economy is indeed collaborative by nature; it is therefore through an abuse of language that a doctrine that attempts to present social facts as “new” is developed on the Internet, social facts that are hardly different from those that have sustained business through the ages in all corners of the world: the collaborative economy is not a discovery; it is practically a pleonasm!

What is true, on the other hand, is that by shrinking the world to the scale of a virtual agora without territory or borders, the Internet is changing the conditions of the trading of news or knowledge, goods or services, whether it be paid or free: unlike caravanners or sailors who met known correspondents at each point, it is rare to know with certainty who we are doing business with on the web. As the network expands, it becomes more diverse and it becomes more difficult to know who to trust. People are therefore forced to invent a way of fighting against a generalized distrust, something that is very contradictory to the positive-sum trade dreamed of by the founders of the Internet, ever since the development of the network of networks!

This chapter illustrates the multiple aspects of the collaborative economy, so strangely named by a custom that came from California a few years ago. The author underlines the institutional significance of this concept and links its international success to the need to counter the sometimes-impersonal nature of the relationships that are established through the web. He distinguishes what would, after all, be nothing more than an avatar of electronic commerce, the peer-to-peer merchant that succeeds under the logic of networks and cooperative relationships that make it possible to sustainably manage common goods within a community that are united by stable institutions that ensure their continuity over time. The examples that illustrate this text echo several chapters that deal with platforms and intermediation; they also complement chapters 5 and 6 of Volume 1 that deal with a specific cooperation, the one that produces blockchains and leads to bitcoin and numerous other cyber-currencies.

The collaborative economy can be defined by the fact that individuals contribute in the production of a good or service in various, but rather informal forms. Although it has always existed, the participation of single individuals in production activities on such a collaborative basis has achieved, with the use of the Internet, an unprecedented scale. Although you hitchhiked before BlaBlaCar, rented your second home or a room in town well before Airbnb, and although chauffeur-driven cars were already some kind of a taxi before Uber existed, these platforms gave many people the opportunity to develop new activities: BlaBlaCar has over 20 million subscribers; Airbnb gives access to several million rooms and apartments; and Uber has registered several hundred thousand people who are ready to rent their service as drivers, in its directories. Drawing their inspiration from the writings of Toni Negri, Nicolas Colin and Henri Verdier speak of this phenomenon as an “age of multitude” [COL 15].

Numerous examples

By enabling numerous new activities to develop, the collaborative economy creates trading and transaction opportunities that would not have existed without it; in doing so, it contributes to increasing overall well-being, especially the satisfaction of consumers and these new producers. The example usually put forward to prove the social interest of the collaborative economy is that of drills: they are rarely used; they are usually stored in a tool cupboard; lending or renting them really increases their usefulness because their owner derives additional earnings from them and the person who borrows this material can save a purchase. Thus, thanks to the Internet and through specialized sites (often called platforms), one can carry out a large quantity of micro-exchanges or micro-transactions between individuals such as lending or renting one’s drill! François Meunier1 calls this “the extension of the market”.

Given that individuals become producers or service providers and, in doing so, meet the needs of other individuals, they exchange peer-to-peer just like computers interact directly over the Internet. However, these are obviously individual-to-individual relationships emphasizing the duality of roles: each one in turn either acts as a consumer or as a producer. In some areas, this collaborative peer-to-peer economy has now acquired full visibility. The emblematic cases of Airbnb, BlaBlaCar and Uber have already been mentioned. Initiatives emerge in the most varied fields: you can exchange hours of piano for hours of gardening (or DIY) by joining Accorderies or the Local Exchange Systems; you can rent your car to other individuals on sites like Drivy or Koolicar; you can offer strangers dinner at home (for a fee) thanks to Vizeat. You can even rent your tractor at the Wefarmup site.

However, the collaborative economy is not limited to transactions between individuals. It also refers to other interactions. Cooperation and transfer of knowledge are concerns as well. Thus you can bring your own small equipment to repair in Repair Cafés; a volunteer will show you how to proceed; and even lend you their own tools while you carry out the repair. In the Fablabs, you learn how to manufacture product materials made available to you. Parental crèches are also a part of collaborative economy that seems to cover quite a few associative activities generally considered until now as belonging to the social and solidarity economy. The example of the drill shows that these practices move from an economy of possession to an economy of function. As some gurus say: “You don’t need a drill, you need holes” [BOT 10]. This was already noted by Jeremy Rifkin, highlighting that one would no longer need to own a car, a house or a drill in the future but rather rent them from companies specialized in the provision of fixed assets. What this author underrated was that everyone could as well just rent anything they own2 [RIF 00]!

Another notion to which the collaborative economy sometimes refers to is the circular economy, concerned with energy and environmental consumption. The idea of recycling has become, in some cases, a categorical imperative: nuclear energy is the most dramatic example; and waste sorting is the most daily example. With the development of resale sites between individuals such as Le Bon Coin in France or eBay in the United States, objects that are no longer of use can find a new life with someone else. Certainly, home resale relates to e-commerce, a very popular activity that started in 1996 for eBay. However, the rental of objects has only recently taken off. The Mr Bricolage stores even offer their customers the possibility of renting their own tools to other individuals, via their brand site. Renters receive vouchers, thus encouraging the collaborative economy which seems prima facie to be playing against commercial interests (individuals renting their drills to each other might reduce the brand’s sales:); the brand recovers nonetheless at least part of its stake (and perhaps more!) by building customer loyalty and accelerating the use of the products sold, thus their future renewal!

Important features of the collaborative economy

It is difficult to assess the extent of the collaborative economy, especially since its definition is unclear, its borders shifting and expanding rapidly. The variety of activities in which single individuals are personally involved and the multiplicity of initiatives (start-ups, but also associations) sometimes make it difficult to appreciate the outlines of this particular economy, as much as its range. However, some figures give orders of magnitude: in 2015, there were five million people working in one way or another in the collaborative economy in Great Britain3. Uber had 30,000 self-employed drivers in that country and 1.5 million people used their services in Greater London. In France, tourist accommodation via Airbnb attracted five million people in 2015, compared with two million in 2014. According to a PWC study for the European Commission [VAU 16], transactions on collaborative economy platforms in five main sectors of activity amounted to 28.1 billion euros for the European Union as a whole in 20154. These platforms themselves generated revenues of 3.6 billion euros.

This raises quite a few concerns, summarized by the term uberization: taxi drivers protest against Uber drivers, whom they consider unfair competitors; more recently, Uber drivers joined forces against their “business supplier”. Some are afraid that their work or their business are either threatened or weakened by the platforms, when others review their business perspective. The collaborative economy also triggers a great deal of misunderstanding, because it is difficult to see how a social phenomenon, based on sharing, can lead to the emergence of companies whose market capitalization reaches billions of euros or dollars (or tens of billions). By the summer of 2015, Airbnb’s capitalization was close to 50 billion dollars and that of Uber was 24 billion dollars.

Commercial versus collaborative peer-to-peer

In fact, the collaborative economy covers two quite distinct realities. On the one hand, merchant peer-to-peer and, on the other, cooperative peer-to-peer as the term collaborative economy invokes both collaboration and cooperation. Clearly, cooperation is not so easy in the face of strangers. The Internet so easily connects with third parties that it may find a partner or a counterpart who will, most of the time, be completely foreign, which raises suspicion. Paul Seabright showed that the very essence of human activity is to cooperate with strangers justly, and that the whole of social organization (including markets) makes this collaboration effective [SEA 11]. He suggested that commercial exchange is a particular form of cooperation: when I buy a good, my money allows my seller to buy something else. On their side, they deliver what I asked them for: cooperating with each other improves both situations.

Economic theory has shown that, under certain conditions, this cooperation (the transaction) is particularly effective. But this relies upon institutions: money is one of them; it has a collective nature, it is a public good without which commercial trade loses effectiveness, returning to barter. The recognition of individual property rights is another major prerequisite, also a public good, carried by a legal order. In order for transactions to be fair, it is also necessary that they be monitored and assessed; there needs to be a body binding the parties together: a judge assisted by a police officer. Lastly, competition between sellers, and sometimes also between buyers, are prerequisites for this heavy institutional and organizational cooperative scheme that is a market economy.

Nevertheless, nothing prevents individuals from cooperating within teams whose interpersonal relationships are governed not by market transactions but by a collective management. The Proudhonist or Marxist utopias of the 19th Century imagined entire societies built on this principle. Communism and its collapse have shown that a social organization that excludes market transactions works poorly. Conversely, many non-market cooperations fit very well into the market economy: forming together a social and solidarity economy. In France, this third sector employed 2.39 million people in June 2016, according to the French government5. Mutual societies, heirs of Proudhon’s vision of the 19th Century, are widely present in modern economies, even if they moved closer to the market economy (in this case, the commercial enterprise). Volunteering also involves millions of people in our countries.

The Internet offers many possibilities for transactions and cooperation. In contrast, remote interaction reduces the role of institutions guaranteeing cooperation with strangers. Admittedly, buying and selling on the Internet must respect commercial codes6; even when concluded over the Internet, relations can be arbitrated by a third party, and particularly by a judge. However, being connected via the Internet complicates the play of institutions; for market transactions, this entails fees known as transaction costs7. Alternative mechanisms are therefore required in order to overcome the fears of strangers who interact on the Internet. Two major forms of organization have emerged:

  • – in one case, the intermediary supervises peer-to-peer trading;
  • – conversely, a collective of individuals can manage interaction between its members: this is collaborative peer-to-peer.

Peer-to-peer trading, the intermediation’s triumph

Platforms are the most visible and spectacular form of collaborative economy today8: Airbnb, BlaBlaCar and Uber illustrate this success. In order to fulfill its function, the intermediary must identify who trades (or cooperates) and who acts as its counterpart, and on what basis. This matching is fundamental. The intermediary must therefore have a large set of potential partners to create his pool; platforms are racing for growth and require large financial resources. Most of them, assembled as start-ups, have to convince venture capitalists to support them. In September 2015, BlaBlaCar raised $200 million from investors, mostly American. As for Airbnb, it has raised over $3 billion since its inception, including $850 million in July 2016!

Racing for growth, platforms rely on an indirect network effect. What is this about? On BlaBlaCar, for example, those looking for carpooling hope to find at least one add offering them the route and date they plan to travel. Conversely, drivers should offer seats for potential passengers. Thus, passengers looking for a driver and drivers looking for passengers are linked. The more there are, the more there will be, and vice versa. The number and variety of advertisements have an indirect effect on site audience; in contrast, multiple visitors encourage drivers to submit an offer. Thanks to a critical mass, the matching is self-sustaining, provided that the site functions correctly. This means a bonus to the leader, who has every chance of remaining the leader, so long as they do not commit an error, because the applicants and service providers regularly visit the leading site in priority. Hence the race for platform growth is fully rational. However, sellers and service users do not have the same interest for a platform. In the case of BlaBlaCar or Airbnb, an advertisement to offer seats requires a greater effort than browsing through a site: the wealth of content (and variety of advertisements) values a site. The platform must therefore encourage offers (Airbnb has professional photographers taking pictures of the available accommodation, so that good photos reflect the site); it can also post advertisements for free, which is BlaBlaCar’s policy, collecting a commission from the passenger, but not from the driver (the advertiser), who freely fixes his price.

Mutual assessment and reputation

Platforms do not just connect and match parties. They must also overcome the legitimate anxieties of individuals who cooperate with strangers. They therefore seek to give confidence and, to do so, they provide guarantees. Anyone who rents or lends their equipment obviously wants it back in good condition. The potential passenger does not want to get into a dangerous driver’s car; the driver himself does not want to have any bad encounters. Traditional insurance mechanisms may not be sufficient to protect against the risks of cooperating with strangers. Platforms have hence developed mutual rating systems between parties in a transaction; eBay was the initiator followed by many others: an Airbnb lessor rates the guest and the latter does the same for the host. Once aggregated, these ratings establish reputations: those with whom I have cooperated attest to my ability to do so correctly; conversely, I help establish their own reputation by rating my correspondents myself. Thus, one piece of valuable information that platforms provide is to assess who you are dealing with. However, mutual rating systems are sometimes biased. More generally, they do not avoid discrimination [ZER 14, GE 15]: Uber can promote a driver who is not the closest to the customer “because this driver has a better reputation”! Or a photo of a potential customer can deter the landlord and lead them to claim that accommodation is not available!

At first sight, these ratings nonetheless discipline each other’s behavior: they produce a collective good, building the confidence of users in each other. Platforms therefore have every interest in setting up a rating system that facilitates their business and their long-term success. Generally speaking, platforms encourage individuals to provide as much information as possible about their experience of the service, which reduces distrust from potential users, encourages them to register and promotes the success of the platforms. These free contributions of users constitute a “digital labor” [CAR 15]. For example: someone who has stayed in Paris thanks to Airbnb will be encouraged to share their favorite places with the network. Facilitating dialogue and information exchange within the users’ community is therefore part of the expertise of digital intermediaries.

Uberization and disruption

The success of trading platforms has greatly surprised those whose customers they’ve attracted. We recall the taxi drivers’ protests against Uber9; even the CEO of the Accor group, Sébastien Bazin, perceived the threat that Airbnb has on hotel groups, particularly in Paris. He then invested 225 million euros in digital technology and even declared: “I would have loved to participate in Airbnb!”10 One of the criticisms addressed to the platforms concerns the soliciting of the crowd or the multitude outside of any established institutional framework: the collaborators (i.e. drivers) have no labor status. If anything, it is that of self-entrepreneur similar to a franchise, but without the multiple obligations thereof. Platforms therefore enjoy a competitive advantage over established players like hotels or taxis, because they have fewer fixed assets and a lower cost service. This raises two additional problems:

  • – that of the instability of the actual service operators generated by uberization,
  • – that of the supposedly unfair competition threatening established companies, as a consequence of disruption.

Uberization is widely debated; it appeals for protective, regulatory or legislative measures everywhere. The European Commission published lines of action that are supposed to inspire Member State regulation. These guidelines do not pretend to block the collaborative economy as they assert that the intermediary cannot be held liable. This seems however to be a rather light position because, thanks to their worldwide presence with tens of millions of clients and service providers, platforms are, in practice, fully aware of the actual situation. They could therefore ensure some responsibility in the event of certain failures. Moreover, platforms are daily informed on the behavior and working conditions of service operators like drivers, given that they constantly collect a lot of precise data on them. In addition, a platform should not abuse its position as an exclusive business provider, for example with drivers, again. Thus, even if their deals are not qualified as an employment contract but rather as a trade relationship, it would be conceivable that a platform might be subjected to certain plausible obligations like supervision, control and protection of their collaborators-partners. As we can see, a new kind of relationship is bound to overlook these new forms of activity.

As far as disruption is concerned, the threat seems stronger than the action (as they say in chess). Indeed, the most spectacular advances mainly concern two sectors: transport and accommodation both are seriously disrupted by the major platforms. As for the rest, despite multiple initiatives, few are reaching a critical mass, which does not exclude some niche market at a local level. The PWC European market study cited above [VAU 16] indicates that transport and accommodation account for 78% of the European collaborative transactions and 71% of platform revenue: what makes transportation and accommodation so attractive is the existence of real unused resources like a house or a vehicle, both worth much more than a drill! Moreover, mobilizing these resources requires practically no experience as anyone can drive or give his/her home even if it requires some precautions. Matching of supply and demand is also not complicated. As a result, transportation and accommodation activities develop rapidly within the framework of peer-to-peer trading. However, it is not so certain that comparable conditions can be found in other sectors. Disruption therefore comes from digital technology and robotization rather than from the collaborative economy. This threat seems to be taken seriously by most observers, as already mentioned in Chapter 1. Half of the existing jobs might be substituted by robots in the long run. This does not necessarily mean that it will happen because costs, technical standards and regulation may slow down man-machine substitution, notwithstanding the social movements that could stop it. But even if the trend is weaker than expected, the organization of most firms will be at stake even in sectors that are still protected, such as lawyers or accountants.

Future of peer-to-peer trading

What might the future of peer-to-peer trading be? Many start-ups engage in this kind of activity, but only a handful succeed. For reasons already mentioned, peer-to-peer (P2P) trading is likely to be confined to a few sectors, although intermediaries could survive in niche or even micro-niche markets. Identifying a business opportunity and a convincing argument for business angels and investment funds is not enough, as the road to success is undoubtedly rough!

A very interesting press report11 clearly explains why collaborative platforms (e.g. Airbnb and Uber) turn to professional providers rather than to the crowd: Airbnb targets time-shared furnished flats; and Uber gathers fleets of vehicles with their drivers. This allows the two operators to quickly reach a critical mass despite costly expenses due to the development of platforms, to pairing algorithms and to the processing of big data collected on servers; the ergonomics of their site, promotion and advertising are also significant fixed costs. In this respect, the expensive purchase of keywords at Google auctions is important because such operators need to be well known on the web. Some of them are backed by firms that already mobilize extensive resources: Ouicar is a subsidiary of the French national railways (car rental between private individuals); Frizbiz (DIY assistance between neighbors) is paired with the home appliances distributor Leroy-Merlin. However, as Segond wrote: the multitude must be conquered in order to reach a critical mass, because the main stock of unused resources belongs to this very multitude!

Hence, even though it is dynamic, the growth of a start-up is strongly non-linear: a long uneven starting phase, punctuated by gigantic technical and promotional expenses (if all goes well) precedes a rapid acceleration, which makes it possible to gain a critical mass while profitability undoubtedly appears well after its maturity12. If reputation and turnover do not pick up, then the firm either closes up shop, which happens in many cases; or it limits itself to a niche by drastically cutting down its expenditure, provided sufficient resources still allow a strategic withdrawal. When the platform is absorbed by another operator, as was the case when the Internet bubble blew around 2000, that disruption fades away and the peer-to-peer trader consequently falls into line: business may continue as usual!

How is collaborative peer-to-peer actually organized?

Driven by intermediaries, trading organizes transactions: one sells to the other. Control and incentives set up by the platforms ease cooperation between strangers rather effectively and generate indirect network effects. Peer-to-peer trading hence experienced a spectacular development. On the contrary, collaborative peer-to-peer had more difficulty deploying itself, with some exceptions: Wikipedia and open software such as Linux, Firefox or Apache are good examples. Collaborative peer-to-peer results, admittedly, from an explicit willingness of some people to cooperate with others and to implement this cooperation. We suspect that this could sometimes be complicated! Thus, while peer-to-peer trading focuses on external growth, collaborative peer-to-peer is primarily dedicated to the target group and to its governance. Wikipedia illustrates how it actually happens (Box 4.1).

As a general rule, collaborative peer-to-peer rather some collective good that can be described as a “common good” (i.e. commons). In the case of Wikipedia, encyclopedic knowledge deposited in servers is accessible online for viewing, without any restriction. While storage and access have a cost, its use is free of charge as most of it is financed by donations in money or in kind (private individual, firm and company – like Google – donations, and foundations). In other cases, costs are covered by contributions (which may restrict access, the community somehow behaving as a club) or by market activities (case of some Fablabs who rent machines or services to companies). The funding is diversified so that the community can ensure its governance. It might therefore be tricky to establish a fair and stable economic model for these collectives, in order to not only allow them to cover their costs, but also to make themselves sustainable in the long run.

Are commons manageable?

Elinor Ostrom [OST 15] observed many communities that were able to preserve a common resource in extremely varied geographical, cultural and social contexts. She showed that collective management does not always lead to the “tragedy of the common good” raised by Garret Hardin, who indicated, in a famous article, that individuals who manage a collective good together may have an individual interest in circumventing the rules of the community and that they inevitably do so, which leads to the vanishing of this community and to the exhaustion of its resource14. The communities observed by Ostrom have existed since time immemorial. From their permanence, she drew eight principles of action in order to reach good governance. These principles are supported by common sense; there is no reason to ignore them. As history has shown, they provide the best conditions for maintaining good governance:

  • – a clear definition of the common objective;
  • – access rules adapted to the shared good, its production and its preservation;
  • – involvement of the users concerned in the development of the common rules;
  • – responsibility of the controllers to prevent cheating across the community;
  • – graduated and proportionate penalties in case of infringements to the rules;
  • – subsidiarity of controls to be carried out as close as possible to the users;
  • – recognition of the community by authorities who have some power over it;
  • – interlocking between communities who manage distinct but related assets.

The nature of the jointly managed property is directly related to the size of the community. The information asset that Wikipedia produces can be easily stored; it can also be reproduced at a very low cost. These principles, being supported by common sense, give no reason to ignore them. As history has shown, they provide the best conditions for maintaining good governance! Under these conditions, it is not economically useful to limit access, especially as it would be socially harmful (those that are excluded would be deprived of access to knowledge!). Furthermore, an encyclopedia can be developed by putting contributors at work in parallel with each other, which makes it possible to increase their number without creating too many coordination problems, given that the writing of each article can be done independently from that of the other articles. For free software, which are also informational assets, a coordination is however necessary, because the production of each contributor must fit into a perfectly arranged, functioning whole of the software. In addition to this, the expertise of each contributor is very punctual, but high. Free software cannot therefore be based on too large a community. The community of test users who report program bugs can, on the contrary, be much larger15.

Community administration of a reserved good

Access to the commons must be kept under control in order to prevent it from being exhausted as it is consumed, so that a public common good becomes a collective good of reserved access, managed by a club (that of a fishery, for example). This community is, by force of circumstance, often quite small even though certain material commons do affect all humanity: such is the case for climate, energy and most ecological resources! Governance is often delegated, in such a case, to inter-state relations that reflect a collective management of the resources for humanity as a whole16!

In general, therefore, self-organized peer-to-peer communities manage a local resource involving a small number of participants. This makes governance less at risk but is not exempt from a verticality that translates into the existence of an executive office (an irrigation association, for example). These communities may have difficulty “scaling up”, that is to say, increasing their size. Of course, those related to the preservation of a geographically limited resource are not set up to extend beyond the area of exploitation. However, even in this case, scaling up may be necessary for several reasons: first, as Ostrom pointed out, self-organized communities need to be recognized by outside institutions, even if they delegate the task of managing the collective good to them (such as a marine fishery or an irrigation system), without intervening in its governance. This recognition of a superior authority will be much easier to obtain if the community is larger. Some may even receive special assistance from outside institutions (from a municipality, for example) when their actions have positive external effects on third parties, those who are not direct members of the community itself.

Scaling up is, in essence, what mutualist organizations experienced in various sectors at the beginning of the 20th Century. In this specific case, the movement was almost inevitable because mutuals are based on risk sharing: the larger the mutual, the lower the individual risk because more people are able to help you in the event of a problem, which reduces the individual cost of help. For local collective goods, grouping into a larger network of collectives is less obvious because the potential gains we have mentioned above may reveal transaction costs or bureaucratization, which is linked to the vertical nature of the organization! Most local initiatives therefore do not see the interest in using digital technology to scale up if and when most collective interactions are done face-to-face. On the contrary, digital technology could not only help them by reducing certain operating costs (even at a local level), but also by promoting governance as a whole, by easing the flow of information among the members and implicating their crowd more in decision-making, which would reduce the weight of vertical structures. Wikipedia shows this very well because, in this community of several million contributors, the bureaucracy is very light compared to the size of the community20.

Looking at the future of collaborative peer-to-peer

Like peer-to-peer trading, one can try to sketch a scenario for the evolution of collaborative peer-to-peer. Some [BAU 15] see it as a paradigm, capable of questioning the traditional way of cooperating with strangers: a means to replace the market transaction and its corollary, the capitalist market economy! The respective evolutions of the two forms of peer-to-peer (trading vs. collaborative) suggests that this vision is optimistic because peer-to-peer trading develops on a global scale, mobilizing huge funds despite the difficulties mentioned earlier.

As for collaborative peer-to-peer, it comes up against both governance problems and scalability as mentioned above. Some technologies such as blockchains – like market mechanisms and institutions – allow cooperation between strangers, while maintaining a purely individualistic attitude, because they are designed to authenticate transactions without intermediaries or trusted third parties21. This reduces the usefulness of trading platforms because, in principle, everyone’s contribution is perfectly identifiable as long as a single indicator can assess everyone’s contribution22. Blockchains may be, in a way, an algorithmic guarantee generating trust and facilitating cooperation between anyone: technology would therefore replace the intermediary although technical and institutional difficulties currently prevent these technologies from taking off widely23. The collaborative peer-to-peer identified here works on different technological bases. Members of the community are driven by altruistic motivations most of the time: a cooperative spirit brings them together around a common good to produce together and share it. We reported that, facing the risk of stowaways and other risks, communities may become vertical and are confronted with governance, oversight and control issues. Even if Elinor Ostrom’s recommendations limit negative effects, they are all the more important as communities grow. Technology can help to reduce them, improve governance and facilitate peer review at a level which is the closest to the individuals involved.

The future of collaborative peer-to-peer will primarily depend on the ability of individuals to find or to gain the power to act. This willingness can have several origins: material difficulties obliging one to be inventive; a challenge to oneself, a distrust towards institutions (private or public) or a distrust towards technology. But the Internet offers tools so that this power can be realized collectively, around a common good, since the Internet was created in a decentralized way by a community, lest we forget! The network makes it possible to communicate and to share knowledge that has been built together. Cooperators who become involved in collaborative peer-to-peer must use appropriate tools to scale up, a prerequisite for their potential growth as much as that of the peer-to-peer trader. We can therefore speculate that, for some time to come, the collaboration may stall a little: it will take time for cooperators to really appropriate digital tools and for the latter to reveal their potential for their own project. The age-old example of mutualist movements has proven that a cooperative can be perfectly sustainable in a market environment; this should encourage collaborative peer-to-peer supporters and allow them to exist alongside peer-to-peer trading24!

Conclusion

The collaborative economy touches upon several different and sometimes complementary topics: sharing or trading between peers; the collaboration of individuals within the same group; and the contribution of each to the future of that group25. By crossing these forms of cooperation with the four main categories of objects covered by this cooperation (goods, services, information and projects), a typology in seven classes has been proposed, which is shown in the shaded area of Figure 4.1 [DAU 14]. Our framework of analysis can be contextualized in this typology:

  • – to the left of the table, buying and selling activities between individuals have been grouped; this is the field of peer-to-peer e-commerce;
  • – on the contrary, to the right one finds forms of collaborative actions in which individuals contribute to a common project (which can either be immaterial, for example, sustaining an encyclopedia like Wikipedia, or material and concrete, like supporting a short-circuit agriculture); or produce objects whose plans remain freely accessible to all (for example 3D printers shared in the Fablabs).

The distinction between peer-to-peer trading and collaborative peer-to-peer is part of this classification: the trader is placed to the left of Figure 4.1, covering buying and selling and certain lending activities (case of the drill mentioned above), as well as information sharing (social networks are the best example). The market intermediary has to create value and appropriate it as much as possible, given the constraints on this activity: high initial costs before reaching a critical mass26. Cooperative peer-to-peer platforms also concern sharing of information (Openstreetmap in the same way as Repair Cafés) which stresses a possible overlap between trading and collaborative, highlighted in Figure 4.1.

Commercial social networks (Facebook, YouTube, etc.) have much greater visibility than exchange and peer-to-peer information communities. We should emphasize again that collaborative peer-to-peer concentrates around common, tangible or intangible projects; and, to a lesser extent, on sharing objects and exchanging services, which constitutes a second area of overlap with peer-to-peer trading. In fact, the collaborative economy is not homogeneous: several activities overlap here and each of them intertwine market services and non-market services.

The first category, that of the purchase and sale of goods (which refers to e-commerce), brings traditional operators closer to recycling practices between individuals (flea markets, etc.). The provision of services and the hiring of current goods between private individuals fall within the scope of uberization, in other words, activities with a precarious status which have the effect of creating interstitial work; these activities will undoubtedly impose a legal adaptation on the notion of employment in order to make this work benefit from institutional recognition (in Ostrom’s sense), because these practices, that are born spontaneously, are developing rapidly but outside the recognized statutes. The sharing economy also structures another category of action: that of information exchanges, where peer-to-peer trading dominates. Information, just like knowledge, is essentially a public good. However, the social networks that produce social information, a necessary condition for sociability, rely on private operators who have overwhelming positions (Facebook, YouTube, etc.).

images

Figure 4.1. Typology of collaborative economy activities

The result is a certain tension between:

  • – on the one hand, the expectations of individuals who would like to control information that concerns them personally and freely access the data that interests them – the purpose of access to open data;
  • – on the other hand, platform operators who collect information that is lying around (big data) so as to enhance an advertising purpose, for instance;
  • – lastly, another kind of common good, mobilized by individuals wishing to create or to preserve a common resource, often abstract such as knowledge.

To enhance the collective spirit of a project one must, for example, maintain peer control and a recognized institution. This requires successful scaling up, which is the real challenge for all communities dedicated to common goods. Thus, far from converging towards a single model, the collaborative economy covers a multiple and moving reality whose outlines still remain vague. It is neither the alpha nor the omega of the digital society but it raises original economic and societal questions.

Bibliography

[BAU 15] BAUWENS M., LIEVENS J., Sauver le monde : vers une économie post-capitaliste avec le peer to peer, Les liens qui libèrent, Paris, 2015.

[BOT 10] BOTSMAN R., ROGERS Y., What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, Collins, New York, 2010.

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[COL 15] COLIN N., VERDIER H., L’âge de la multitude, Armand Colin, Paris, 2015.

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Chapter written by Godefroy DANG N’GUYEN.

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