Collaborative Consumption Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Collaborative Consumption - Essay Example The concept of collaborative consumption has been aided by advancing technology and peer communities that reinvents old behaviours of the market on new scale and ways that have not been witnessed before. Examples of aspects that enhance collaborative consumption include: car sharing marketplaces such as Zipcar, huge marketplaces such as Craiglist and eBay, and peer-to-peer communities such as GuideHop (Walljasper, 2010, p. 28). Several studies have shown that collaborative consumption is greatly disrupting the traditional business models, while at the same time reinventing old market behaviours thereby influencing how people consume and what they consume. Since collaborative consumption is disrupting the traditional business models and reinventing old market behaviours, it is conceivable that this new era will require a dramatic re-evaluation of everything that we know regarding improvement of the relationship between the customers and the suppliers. It is no doubt that the extent of re-evaluation would be bigger than even imagined. This is some sort of paradigm shift from â€Å"common consumption† that has been characterized by a number of problems, miscommunication being its biggest problem (Baron and Harris, 2008, p. 113). Collaborative consumption is informed by the theory of collaboration which basically states that collaboration is enhanced among people when the collaborators are expecting beneficial outcome from the collaboration. Price et al (2006, p. 51) argues that this theory holds that collaboration is vital towards eliminating inherent selfish nature of human beings by making them see benefits out of combined actio ns and efforts. Further, collaborative consumption is informed by the collaboration theory assumption that it has a causal outcome; that is, if causal outcome is higher then the collaborators would have higher commitment and participation levels. Even though â€Å"common consumption† is still prominent in the marketplaces, it is emerging that everything is becoming collaborative. The world has in recent times has experienced immense renting and swapping of clothes, homes, and cars through technologies and peer communities such as Airnb, Zipcar, and RentCycle (Walljasper, 2010, p. 57). Collaborative consumption is a theory in itself that holds that people can buy something without necessarily owning it. The view of not owning something after buying it notwithstanding, a person buying it should take responsibility for them, be it clothes, electric, or car. The era of collaborative consumption requires dramatic re-evaluation in respect to both customer-supplier relationship and how we look at the community. This dramatic re-evaluation has to entail the understanding of the resurgence of community, the values in the community, and how members of the community connect to one another. The same re-evaluation should be applied to the customer- supplier relationship. As has been noted, consumers and suppliers in this model calls for more responsibilities; as such, it is critical to re-evaluate the accountability and the responsibility aspects in the model (Holt, 2005, p. 6). Collaborative consumption has been touted as one of the greatest revolutions of our time and may be as significant as the industrial revolution. It has been argued