The integration of item-sharing and crowdshipping: Can collaborative consumption be pushed by delivering through the crowd?

Item-sharing and crowdshipping are two concepts of the sharing economy. In item-sharing, members of a sharing community can temporarily rent items such as tools or leisure equipment from one another. In crowdshipping, private drivers offer to execute delivery jobs for other people on trips they would make anyway. Since the peer-to-peer exchange in item-sharing involves repeated, inefficient 'last-mile' transports of small shipments, we investigate here whether the integration of item-sharing and crowdshipping has the potential to facilitate collaborative consumption. To this end, the decision making for an integrated item-sharing and crowdshipping platform is modeled. This platform matches supplies, requests, and planned trips of the community members. We develop mathematical models and heuristics for maximizing the platform's profit and the number of fulfilled requests. Our results quantify and confirm the substantial benefit of integrating item-sharing and crowdshipping.