Sharing economy and collaborative consumption: what are we researching?

Although sharing economy is a recent phenomenon, it has been increasingly spread. Many sharing economy companies have become successful and sustainable business models, which evinces the great potential of this phenomenon for economic development Aiming to expand the knowledge of this economic phenomenon, it was sought to respond to how the study of Sharing Economy and Collaborative Consumption has evolved and what the trends presented in the international scientific production are. This research analyzed the international scientific publications related to the Sharing Economy and Collaborative Consumption themes, which makes the construction of a map of the published studies possible. From the bibliometric analysis of articles indexed in the Scopus, Web of Science, Springer Link, Wiley Online Library, SciVerse ScienceDirect and SAGE collections, between 1978 and February 2016, 44 articles, written by 77 authors and published in 35 journals, were found. Moreover, through systematic analysis of the literature, the main contributions of these publications were analyzed by identifying four major issues: Ontology, An alternative to consumption and its drivers, Technology, and Collaborative Business Management. Finally, this article provides an overview of the research in Collaborative Consumption and Sharing Economy from the issues identified, and it also identifies opportunity for future research that might analyze this phenomenon by refining and testing the theoretical approaches. 2016 Departamento de Administracao, Faculdade de Economia, Administracao e Contabilidade da Universidade de Sao Paulo - FEA/USP. Published by Elsevier Editora Ltda.