Participation, Privacy and Power in the Sharing Economy

Power Framework and Recommendations

Recommendations for businesses, policy makers, and educators on how to ensure a fair, transparent, and empowering European Sharing Economy. Recommendations for (1) businesses, (2) policy makers, and (3) educators. The deliverable will contain recommendations for how businesses can reduce power asymmetries and perceptions of unfairness, thus lowering platform churn, as well as outline for policy makers how European citizens perceive the current regulatory landscape and how it could be improved. Finally, we will derive recommendations for educators on how to better inform individuals of how to navigate the sharing economy to best avoid unfair scenarios

Design guidelines for Sharing Platforms

Design Principles

Privacy Framework and Recommendations

Recommendations for business, policy makers and educators on a non-discriminatory, barrier-free and privacy friendly European sharing econo-my.

Participation Frame-work and Recommendations

Recommendations for business, policy makers and educators on a non-discriminatory, barrier-free and privacy friendly European sharing econo-my.

Focus Groups on Consumer Perceptions of the Sharing Economy

A report on consumer perceptions of the challenges and benefits of the sharing economy. In particular, in this report, based on open-ended interview data conducted within the countries represented within the consortium, matters of privacy, power relations and participation are discussed.

Final Dissemination report

Dissemination report

Power Report

Report on quantitative data analysis surrounding power dynamics in the European Sharing Economy Exploration into an online survey targeting both users and non-users of the sharing economy. Based on a nationally representative survey of more than 6,000 participants across 12 European countries. Our aim is to identify the perceptions and opinions of European citizens towards the sharing economy, its platforms, and other users through a lens of asymmetric power dynamics.

Host/Consumer Privacy Report

Report on quantitative data analysis of host privacy in the European shar-ing economy

State of the Art Overview Power Relations

State of the art theoretical and empirical literature review on the topic of ‘Power in the Sharing Economy’ A report critically exploring the current and future role of power dynamics between users, providers, and platforms in the sharing economy. Taking a particular focus on the asymmetries of power and control established by sharing economy platforms, the report aims to expand the existing research and extend our knowledge on potential mechanisms for exploitative practices, disempowerment, and unfairness.

Platform Analysis Report

Results from platform analysis

Non-Participation Report

Report on quantitative data analysis of non-participation in the European sharing economy.

State of the Art Overview Sharing Divide

State of the Art overview of previous theoretical and empirical findings on the “sharing divide”

Project management plan

Project management plan - revised plan for the management of the project

Final report

report summarising the development and the findings of the project

State of the Art Overview Host/Consumer Privacy

State of the Art theoretical overview of consumer privacy in the sharing economy, inclusive of seminars with experts from the fields of research, business, culture and policy.

Open Data Dissemination

The project partners make sure to make the output data from the project findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. The project will produce three main types of data with increasing degree of confidentiality: a) Reports: Literature overviews, platform analyses and recommendations/guidelines b) Survey data in structured, anonymized (non-identifiable) form c) Interview transcripts from qualitative interviews with both ordinary citizens (participants and non-participants in the sharing economy) as well as experts/key stakeholders (employees and platform designers in the sharing economy) The data from the literature review will come in unstructured text form but we plan to synthesize the findings in a more structured manner, for example with tables or Figures that allow the inclusion of relational aspects (e.g., hyperlinks to the original studies within a table). We deem this type of data to be unproblematic for sharing in a public repository and – following the open access policy of Horizon 2020 projects – aim at making it freely available, corresponding with the FAIR Guidelines. In particular, we will host key documents from the reports and the reports themselves in an institutional repository of one (or all) of the participating institutions. (We will certainly use Alexandria (University of St. Gallen) and BI Brage (BI Norwegian Business School) to deposit these reports. Alexandria is based on the eprints software, allows the creation of project pages (where all adjacent and project-relevant documents can be stored), is well indexed in Google, enables the entry of a rich set of metadata, is indexed in Google Scholar and has social media plug-ins. This enables interoperability.) Thus, these documents will be findable and accessible. We aim at making key elements from the reports interoperable and reusable by transforming them into a machine-readable format (CSV tables or relational databases) under a Creative Commons CC-BY license. The survey data will come in structured form from an online survey. We will collaborate with an ESOMAR-certified market research company for the recruiting of participants and data collection and aim at 1500 responses across several European countries. We will adhere to good practice in survey design (e.g., prepare a participant information sheet as well as an understandable consent form). The respondents of the survey will remain anonymous and we will not ask for information that allows easy personal identification such as names, (email) addresses, postal code or employer. The survey data will be cleaned and uploaded in standard formats (CSV) on an institutional repository of one of the collaborating partners under a Creative Commons CC-BY license. Thus, it will be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. Finally, the interview transcripts will include sensitive information. Thus, the project team will decide on a case-by-case basis whether to openly share the data – in anonymized form. For the expert interviews, non-disclosure agreements might prevent the data from being shared. We will weigh the privacy considerations first in all cases.

Project website and social media channels established

Deliverables

Publications

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