Exploring the Sharing Paradox in Collaborative Consumption: Conceptualizing and Measuring Paradoxical Sharing Behaviors

Despite the growing trend of collaborative consumption in the “sharing economy”, there is a notable research gap in how peer service providers manage the conflicting roles of being both owners and sharers simultaneously. This study builds upon psychological ownership and paradox literature to introduce the concept of “paradoxical sharing behaviors” (PSB), which describes peer service providers’ competing, interrelated behaviors undertaken to meet demands arising from their different roles, simultaneously and over time. Through in-depth interviews and five main studies (n= 2,237 participants, spanning across the UK, Europe, US, Hong Kong, and China in sharing contexts of ride, accommodation, and luxury sharing), we develop a scale for measuring PSB, according to dimensions of control, self-identity, intimacy, and territoriality. Our research affirms the psychometric properties of the scale, including convergent, discriminant, nomological, known-group, and predictive validity. The findings also reveal that service providers with a holistic mindset and strong economic and social motives tend to exhibit PSB. These behaviors can potentially enhance service quality and promote extra-role behaviors in both the short- and long-term. This research enriches the existing body of work on paradoxes by expanding its application to the sharing economy, providing novel insights for researchers and practitioners to understand barriers that prevent service providers from sharing their properties and offering a tool to measure service providers’ ability to handle such a paradox.