Towards a theory of sharing economy-based service triad

The sharing economy is a fast-growing phenomenon that has significantly disrupted traditional businesses. Sharing-economy businesses are involved in many sectors, such as the transportation, accommodation, labour, financial and food sectors. Thus, these companies have been considered important by both industrial and academic areas. Sharing-economy platform companies in different sharing-economy industries seek to constantly improve their “sharing” business to provide better services to users. Fundamentally, the nature of the sharing economy consists of three actors, the platform, service supplier and customer, forming a triadic structure within one specific sharing economy context. Among the main streams of service operations management research, it is surprising that, with a few exceptions, the role of platform service operations management in the sharing economy context has been ignored by researchers. Little is known about how sharing-economy platforms carry out their daily operations management in different sectors. To address this gap in the literature, four papers have been developed, including one literature review paper (conceptual paper) and three empirical papers. Seven unicorn level sharing-economy platform companies from three sharing-economy industries were selected for investigation in this research. They are DiDi and Uber China (ride- sharing industry), OfO, Mobike and Hellobike (bike-sharing industry) and Huochebang and Yunmanman (logistics-sharing industry). By adopting different theories, such as balance theory, social capital theory, contingency theory, social exchange theory, information processing theory and the knowledge-based view, this study investigates different aspects of operations management under the sharing-economy context accordingly, such as the role of different platform strategies in sustainability, the influence of contingent factors on platform stickiness, bike-sharing platforms’ operations management and information management of the sharing-economy platform, and thus makes a significant theoretical contribution to the service operations management literature, providing insightful practical implications for sharing-economy platforms.