Millennials and the sharing economy: Lessons from a 'buy nothing new, share everything month' project

- Experiential learning project explores student relationship with the sharing economy.
- For one month students were asked not to buy anything new, other than food and absolute necessities.
- Students had instead to rely on the sharing economy to meet their needs.
- Results suggest a shift toward access-driven mindset may be more challenging than popularly assumed.
- Economic reasons were by far the most common, but social value was also found to be important for the students.

There is a growing consensus that millennials (people born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s) have embraced the sharing economy in large numbers, adopting a new mindset in which access to goods and services is seen as more valuable than ownership of them. While surveys suggest this shift may be underway, little research has been done on behavior directly. This paper is a step in that direction. My project examines student engagement with the sharing economy through experiential learning. For one month, students were asked not to buy anything new, other than food and absolute necessities. Instead, they were expected to rely on the sharing economy to meet their needs and then to describe their experiences. I use mixed-methods design to analyze the resulting data quantitatively and qualitatively. Although the findings do not generalize to millennials as a whole, they point to a possible research program with which to test millennial engagement with the sharing economy. The results also suggest that a shift toward this new, access-driven mindset may be more challenging than popularly assumed.