Sharing Economy and Big Data Analytics

Book excerpt: The different facets of the sharing economy offer numerous opportunities for businesses ? particularly those that can be distinguished by their creative ideas and their ability to easily connect buyers and senders of goods and services via digital platforms. At the beginning of the growth of this economy, the advanced digital technologies generated billions of bytes of data that constitute what we call Big Data. This book underlines the facilitating role of Big Data analytics, explaining why and how data analysis algorithms can be integrated operationally, in order to extract value and to improve the practices of the sharing economy. It examines the reasons why these new techniques are necessary for businesses of this economy and proposes a series of useful applications that illustrate the use of data in the sharing ecosystem.