On the Efficiency of Sharing Economy Networks

TL;DR

This paper analyzes a sharing economy network model where agents exchange resources to maximize fairness, stability, and individual benefit, revealing how network structure influences sharing outcomes and proposing a dynamic sharing policy.

Contribution

It introduces a unified framework linking fairness, stability, and market equilibrium in resource sharing networks, and proposes a dynamic policy achieving long-term equilibrium.

Findings

Unique family of fair and stable sharing allocations identified

Network topology significantly affects sharing ratios

Dynamic policy converges to equilibrium allocations

Abstract

We consider a sharing economy network where agents embedded in a graph share their resources. This is a fundamental model that abstracts numerous emerging applications of collaborative consumption systems. The agents generate a random amount of spare resource that they can exchange with their one-hop neighbours, seeking to maximize the amount of desirable resource items they receive in the long run. We study this system from three different perspectives: a) the central designer who seeks the resource allocation that achieves the most fair endowments after the exchange; b) the game theoretic where the nodes seek to form sharing coalitions within teams, attempting to maximize the benefit of their team only; c) the market where the nodes are engaged in trade with their neighbours trying to improve their own benefit. It is shown that there is a unique family of sharing allocations that are at the same time most fair, stable with respect to continuous coalition formation among the nodes and achieving equilibrium in the market perspective. A dynamic sharing policy is given then where each node observes the sharing rates of its neighbours and allocates its resource accordingly. That policy is shown to achieve long term sharing ratios that are within the family of equilibrium allocations of the static problem. The equilibrium allocations have interesting properties that highlight the dependence of the sharing ratios of each node to the structure of the topology graph and the effect of the isolation of a node on the benefit may extract from his neighbours.