Putting the sharing economy into perspective

We develop a conceptual framework that allows us to define the sharing economy and its close cousins and we understand its sudden rise from an economic-historic perspective. We then assess the sharing economy platforms in terms of the economic, social and environmental impacts. We end with reflections on current regulations and future alternatives, and suggest a number of future research questions.(C) 2017 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license.