Arun Sundararajan > Quotes

“Beyond the public relations efforts of platforms like Uber and Airbnb, there may be deeper reasons why the term “sharing economy” is so popular: It captures some of the thinking and the idealism of the early proponents of economy-wide sharing approaches. It hints at the shift away from faceless, impersonal 20th-century capitalism and toward exchange that is somehow more connected, more embedded in community, more reflective of a shared purpose.”
― Arun Sundararajan, The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism

“Works of art exist simultaneously in two ‘economies,’ a market economy and a gift economy. Only one of these is essential, however: a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift, there is no art.”
― Arun Sundararajan, The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism

“Today’s sharing economy is scaling behaviors and forms of exchange that used to be among such “close-knit communities” to a broader, loosely knit digital community of semi-anonymous peers. In asking whether we should expect the natural integration into the sharing economy of the “gift” motivations and practices that characterized the economies of these smaller communities, I have found that is useful to view the new economic activity as existing on a continuum between gift economies and market economies, with some cases at both ends of the spectrum, and many more in between. Let”
― Arun Sundararajan, The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism

“I discuss later in this chapter, peer-to-peer markets are especially robust in densely populated urban areas, and more advantageous there too, because they work more efficiently when their participants live in close proximity.”
― Arun Sundararajan, The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism