Service Delivery in the Sharing Economy: Assumptions and Technology Affordances for Service Interactions on Ridesharing Platforms

To better understand the nature of service delivery in the sharing economy, we conducted a comparative analysis of the technology features and website branding of three exemplar ridesharing platforms – Uber®, BlaBlaCar® and Zimride®. To facilitate our theorizing of this multiple case study, we applied literature on service design to our collected data. This helped us to undercover each platform’s assumptions and technology affordances for service interactions between providers and customers. It also enabled us to characterize each platform’s governance concern and mechanism, th

Anita D. Bhappu is Acting Associate Professor of Management in the School of Engineering at the University of California, Merced. She received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering, as well as her M.S. and Ph.D. in Management, from the University of Arizona. Dr. Bhappu conducts research on team collaboration, workplace diversity, service delivery and digital retailing. More recently, she has been studying the sharing economy and exploring how organizations can build employee engagement and inclusion by promoting collaborative consumption among coworkers. She is the Founder and CEO of Sharing Tribes LLC, a startup company that is developing a software-as-a-service platform based on this research. Dr. Bhappu has published in top-tier journals such as the Academy of Management Review, Internet Research, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Service Research, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes and Management Information Systems Quarterly Executive. She serves on the editorial board of Organization Science. Her research and market insights have been featured in Fast Company, Huffington Post, Marketplace, Marketwatch, Mother Jones, Slate, Time, The Washington Post and USA Today. Dr. Bhappu was previously on the faculty at the University of Arizona and Southern Methodist University. Prior to academia, she worked as a product development engineer for Procter and Gamble.