Collaborative consumption: a goal-based framework

• No framework exists to connect different types of collaborative consumption in the modern market.
• In different social science disciplines, collaboration is aligned with disparate goals.
• Modern collaborative systems can be analyzed in terms of these goals.
• Such an analysis offers hope for practical insights and future programmatic research.

Collaborative consumption takes many forms, including car sharing, community gardens, credit unions and toy libraries. While these phenomena are arguably reshaping the marketplace, to this point, we lack a way to harmonize these diverse systems under a single umbrella or to connect them to prior research. The present paper focuses on the ways that various social sciences have conceptualized collaborative consumption's goals. The resulting goal-based framework allows both alignment of and differentiation among modern collaborative consumption systems. This approach also helps us identify the rich literatures that can inform our study of different types of modern collaborative consumption systems, thus offering potential for future programmatic knowledge-building.