According to @Forbes nearly 25% of the population of the U.S., the U.K. and Canada engages in some form of economic sharing.

Thanks to new digital marketplaces, the consumer is becoming a producer (prosumer) and liabilities turn into assets. Countless of micro-hotels and micro-restaurants will come into existence. It is still unclear how these new markets can be regulated, but it is certain that they will blur the lines between different industries.

Improve quality of life

65% of consumers (and 75% of the aforementioned prosumers, people who are both producer and consumer) say that we would have a better society and improved quality of life if we shared more and owned less. In Indonesia, this number is 75%, in the UK it’s 62%, the US is on 55%, and in Japan it is 18% of the 10.000+ respondents of the Havas Worldwide Prosumer Report from 2014.

Social dining

‘Food, by nature, is communal. As much as we value the actual nutrition, we also value the human interactions and experiences associated with eating. This makes food suitable for the sharing economy’, says Steve Vargas, founder of RiffRaff, a peer-to-peer startup connecting people to help them manage their free time better.
 

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Photo: Lara Lima