Balancing Innovation And Regulation In The Sharing Economy

An early blog post by Francesca Pick — December 12, 2012.

This is an excellent interview from TechCrunch with Arun Sundararajan, professor at New York University Stern School of Business, discussing how to regulate the sharing economy without blocking further innovation.

Sundararajan makes some great points on how the innovative, untried nature of these emerging online business models also puts them in a head-on collision course with regulators. While many of these disruptive business ideas are shaking up established industries, there is still a huge lack of regulatory framework.

Another aspect I found interesting: many incumbent industries fear that P2P platforms will make them obsolete and substitute their business models. While this is of course in part true, we are also seeing an expansion of existing markets. Brian Chesky made a similar case in his speech at the Travel Innovation Summit in Phoenix, using the example that Airbnb has created a market for things that never had a market before, like treehouses and castles.