The Sharing Economy in Computing: A Systematic Literature Review

The sharing economy has quickly become a very prominent subject of research in the broader computing literature and the in human–computer interaction (HCI) literature more specifically. When other computing research areas have experienced similarly rapid growth (e.g. human computation, eco-feedback technology), early stage literature reviews have proved useful and influential by identifying trends and gaps in the literature of interest and by providing key directions for short- and long-term future work. In this paper, we seek to provide the same benefits with respect to computing research on the sharing economy. Specifically, following the suggested approach of prior computing literature reviews, we conducted a systematic review of sharing economy articles published in the Association for Computing Machinery Digital Library to investigate the state of sharing economy research in computing. We performed this review with two simultaneous foci: a broad focus toward the computing literature more generally and a narrow focus specifically on HCI literature. We collected a total of 112 sharing economy articles published between 2008 and 2017 and through our analysis of these papers, we make two core contributions: (1) an understanding of the computing community’s contributions to our knowledge about the sharing economy, and specifically the role of the HCI community in these contributions (i.e. what has been done) and (2) a discussion of under-explored and unexplored aspects of the sharing economy that can serve as a partial research agenda moving forward (i.e. what is next to do).