Governing the sharing economy smartly: A tale of two initiatives in China

Chinese central government in the past few years has embraced the expansion of various sharing economy initiatives. However, the expansion of these initiatives has given rise to public concerns. Central government in turn has adopted different strategies to address them. In this article, we investigate the question of how central government in China governed the two most popular sharing economy initiatives: ridesharing and bike sharing. An analytic framework is constructed, consisting of three government strategies: monitoring, developing frameworks, and managing processes, and two governance styles: go-alone and collaborative. Our study has found that central government generally applied two different strategies, namely, monitoring and developing frameworks, to govern these two sharing economy initiatives. Moreover, a go-alone governance style dominated the processes of governing ridesharing, whereas a collaborative governance style dominated the processes of governing bike sharing. We also found that four conditions, namely, the influence on incumbent industries, market structure, investment model, and time difference, are important in explaining the emergence of different governance styles in governing these two initiatives.