The Rise Of Social Commerce And Collaborative Consumption: Value Creation In Consumer-to-consumer Share-based Marketplaces

This thesis aims to explore the recent rise of consumer-to-consumer share-based online marketplacesemerged in the wake of social commerce and collaborative consumption, as well as the sources of value creation on such marketplaces. Regardless of the substantial attention from both academics and practitioners, resulting into an abundance of studies, articles and researches, the review conducted revealed that literature on such marketplaces developedlargely in silos and has yet to adopt a widely accepted language.Consequently, the intended contributions of this study are twofold. First, to bridge the gaps between the various approaches, thus situating C2C marketplaces within the social commerce and collaborative consumption framework, while unambiguously defining both phenomena.Second, grounded in the different theories on value creation and in the analysis of seven case studies, to identify the sources of value creation in C2C share-based marketplaces, and organize them into an ad hoc developed model.The analysis indicates that, independently of the industry the C2C marketplaces belong to and of the service they provide, value creation hinges on eight interdependent sources-efficiency, complementarities, novelty, lock-in, trust, community, data access and dematerialization-all of which are discussed in the final part of the study, along with the resulting implications and recommendations for traditional players.