Access-Based Consumption: The Case of Car Sharing

By F. Bardhi, Giana M. Eckhardt. 2012

2,091 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Access-based consumption, defined as transactions that can be market mediated but where no transfer of ownership takes place, is becoming increasingly popular, yet it is not well theorized. This study examines the nature of access as it contrasts to ownership and sharing, specifically the consumer-object, consumer-consumer, and consumer-marketer relationships. Six dimensions are identified to distinguish among the range of access-based consumptionscapes: temporality, anonymity, market mediation, consumer involvement, the type of accessed object, and political consumerism. Access-based consumption is examined in the context of car sharing via an interpretive study of Zipcar consumers. Four outcomes of these dimensions in the context of car sharing are identified: lack of identification, varying significance of use and sign value, negative reciprocity resulting in a big-brother model of governance, and a deterrence of brand community. The implications of our findings for understanding the nature of exchange, consumption, and brand community are discussed.

Subfields: Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/41bd439e2ef0c331b4cc1757494fec6a5f00f5d9

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Citations in the corpus

Extended Self in a Digital World (2013, background): “Sometimes the sharing model is commercialized, as with all the .com “sharing” sites that are more accurately short-term rental sites (Bardhi and Eckhardt 2012; Botsman and Rogers 2010; Gansky 2010).”
The collaborative economy and tourism: Critical perspectives, questionable claims and silenced voices (2015, positive): “Common to these collaborative concepts is that they are facilitated by a matchmaker intermediary, and can be thus characterized as market-mediated access (Bardhi & Eckhardt, 2012) rather than auto-mediated P2P exchanges.”
The Sharing Economy Globalization Phenomenon: A Research Agenda (2017, neutral): “Other terms such as “gig economy,” “collaborative consumption” (Botsman and Rogers, 2010), and “access-based economy” (Bardhi and Eckhardt, 2012) have also been used to characterized these for- and nonprofit organizations.”
Sharing for people, planet or profit? Analysing motivations for intended sharing economy participation (2017, positive): “As an extrinsic driver of sharing economy participation, monetary rewards have often been mentioned (Tussyadiah, 2016; 2015; Bardhi & Eckhardt, 2012).”
Defining the Sharing Economy for Sustainability (2019, background): “Strategies to dematerialise our economies permeate academic discourses including product-service systems [4], access-based consumption [5], collaborative consumption [6,7], the sharing economy [8], among others.”
When do materialistic consumers join commercial sharing systems (2016, background): “As this research argued above, Bardhi and Eckhardt's (2012) qualitative study gives a first indication for this assumption.”
Consciousness for sustainable consumption: scale development and new insights in the economic dimension of consumers’ sustainability (2013, background): “, car sharing, social lending) represent niche markets that are being more and more embraced by consumers (Bardhi and Eckhardt 2012; Prothero et al. 2011).”
Green entrepreneurship in the sharing economy: utilising multiplicity of institutional logics (2019, background): “Based on the ongoing discussion of sharing economy models (e.g. Frenken et al. 2015; Belk 2014; Bardhi and Eckhardt 2012; Mont 2002; Schor 2015; Frei 2005; Nesta and TSR 2015; Dervojeda et al. 2013; PWC 2015; Matzler et al. 2014; Grinevich et al. 2015), we separate between the following types of sha”