なぜ消費者はアクセスベース・サービスを選択するのか？

Abstract

Access-based services refer to services facilitated by platforms such as Uber and Rent the Runway that allow consumers to utilize products without the need for ownership. In response to the proliferation of these novel services, a burgeoning body of research has investigated their antecedents. However, there remains a paucity of research that comprehensively systematizes the insights gleaned from extant studies. This paper aims to categorize the antecedents of access-based services, as identified by marketing research since 2017, into four distinct factors: (1) access-specific factors, (2) social factors, (3) psychological factors, and (4) technological factors. In doing so, this study highlights two avenues for future research: the examination of the choice between ownership and access and the exploration of antecedents in the category of intangible content. Consequently, this paper provides strategic guidance to platform marketers and managers regarding initiatives that can positively influence the profitability of their platforms.

Translated Abstract

UberやRent the Runwayなどのプラットフォームを媒介して，消費者が製品を所有することなく利用することができるサービスのことを，アクセスベース・サービスと呼ぶ。この新しいサービスの実務的流行を受けて，その選択要因を探究する研究が増加している。しかしながら，既存研究の知見を包括的に整序する試みは，存在しない。そこで，本論は，2017年以降の最新のマーケティング研究によって見出されたアクセスベース・サービスの選択要因を，（1）アクセス独自要因，（2）社会的要因，（3）心理的要因，（4）技術的要因という4つの要因に分類する。そうすることで，本論は，今後の研究の方向性として，所有とアクセスとの間の選択課題の吟味，および，無形コンテンツカテゴリーにおける選択要因の探究という2点を指摘する。そして，プラットフォームのマーケターや経営者に対して，どのような施策が自社プラットフォームの収益性に良い影響を及ぼすのかという戦略上の指針を提供する。

I.  Introduction

Traditionally, sharing refers to nonreciprocal and social exchanges among people with social relationships, such as siblings sharing clothing, that involve no room for market intervention (Belk, 2014). However, with recent technological advancements, there has been an increase in situations mediated by digital platforms in which value is exchanged through temporary access without the transfer of permanent ownership. For example, services that provide temporary access are increasing in areas such as transportation (Uber), fashion (Rent the Runway), furniture (Feather), and music content (Spotify). By using these services, consumers can utilize products at a lower cost than owning them.

In line with the practical trend of these new services, there have been academic attempts to capture their characteristics via various related concepts, such as access-based consumption (e.g., Bardhi & Eckhardt, 2012), collaborative consumption (e.g., Benoit et al., 2017), and the sharing economy (e.g., Eckhardt et al., 2019). In addition to theoretical studies, empirical research exploring the antecedents of consumers’ choice of new services has increased. As studies have accumulated, review studies have also emerged (e.g., Ashaduzzaman et al., 2023). However, these studies have been limited to accommodation services (e.g., Airbnb) in their scope and cannot be considered comprehensive reviews.

This paper aims to review prior studies by comprehensively organizing and classifying studies that have explored the antecedents of access-based services in various product categories. By doing so, this paper contributes to the academic development of the research field by identifying future directions. It also provides guidelines for marketers and managers when designing services.

II.  Setting the Review Scope

Before presenting the literature review, it is valuable to discuss the characteristics of the sharing economy and access-based services. These concepts have been frequently used by prior studies to describe services that enable consumers to use products without ownership. This discussion can clarify the services targeted in this paper.

Eckhardt et al. (2019) listed five characteristics of the sharing economy: (1) temporary access, (2) transfer of economic value, (3) platform mediation, (4) expanded consumer roles, and (5) crowdsourced supply. Temporary access refers to a form of consumption where consumers can access an object instead of owning it. The transfer of economic value means that there are monetary market transactions in exchange for access rights. Furthermore, it is a defining characteristic of the sharing economy for digital platforms such as Uber, which intervene in this transaction, and for consumers themselves as service providers (e.g., Uber drivers) or for consumers’ unutilized assets to be used as resources for service provision (e.g., consumers’ private cars to provide Uber services).

Bardhi and Eckhardt (2012) defined access-based consumption as an economic market transaction that does not involve the transfer of ownership. On the basis of Bardhi and Eckhardt’s argument (2012), Schaefers et al. (2016) defined access-based services as services that provide consumers with access to products, physical assets, networks, labor, and space for a certain period in exchange for an access fee, while legal ownership remains with the service provider. For example, ZipCar is an access-based service that provides customers with access to automobiles through a platform. Access-based services, as noted by Schaefers et al. (2016), are services that have three of the five characteristics of the sharing economy listed by Eckhardt et al. (2019): temporary access, transfer of economic value, and platform mediation.

On the basis of the above discussion, the characteristics of the sharing economy and access-based services can be summarized as shown in Table 1. This paper reviews studies that discuss access-based services with at least the three characteristics of temporary access, transfer of economic value, and platform mediation.

Table 1

Sharing economy and access-based services

Source: Created by the author based on Benoit et al. (2017), Eckhardt et al. (2019), and Schaefers et al. (2016)

III.  Review Flow

As discussed in the previous section, this paper reviewed the access-based services located on the left side of Table 1. The papers for review were selected through the flow shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1

The process of selecting papers for review

First, using the search tool EBSCOhost, “collaborative consumption” OR “sharing economy” OR “access-based consumption” were used as the subject terms. Collaborative consumption was considered almost synonymous with the sharing economy (cf. Benoit et al., 2017; Yamamoto, 2021). Furthermore, the four refinement conditions shown in Figure 1 were applied. Subsequently, the abstracts of the 188 papers were extracted, and papers were selected that explored the antecedents of the choice of access-based services. Finally, the author checked the full texts of the 56 selected papers and chose the final papers for review. As a result, 32 papers were selected for review.

IV.  Antecedents of Consumers’ Choice of Access-Based Services

Following the process described above, this study reviewed 32 papers. More than 90% of the reviewed papers conducted quantitative surveys and collected primary survey data online. However, some papers conducted in-depth interviews with consumers to gain insight into new consumption practices (e.g., Ulrich et al., 2024). As shown in Table 2, among the product/service categories considered in previous studies, the highest number were studies of accommodation services (e.g., Airbnb), followed by transportation services, fashion, and luxury products. Other categories included camping gear, insurance services, and paintings.

Table 2

Number of papers by product/service category

The antecedents of consumers’ choice of access-based services were classified into four broad categories (see Table 3).

Table 3

Antecedents of consumers’ choice of access-based services

1.  Access-specific factors

The first category of antecedents is access-specific factors. Various service characteristics related to the features of access-based services that allow consumers to use products without owning them have significant impacts on consumers’ choice.

By accessing products and services without owning them, consumers can use them at a lower cost. The economic and temporal cost advantage of access-based services promotes consumers’ adoption of this new form of consumption. In fact, the largest number of papers cited cost advantage as an antecedent of the choice of access-based services (see Table 3). Some of the reviewed papers argued that cost advantage was the most influential antecedent (Park & Armstrong, 2019b).

Sharing products among consumers also solves the problem of product disposal. Therefore, the environmental advantage of these services is also an important antecedent. In particular, it has been stated that the environmental advantage is valued by European consumers, who have a high level of awareness of environmental issues (Ulrich et al., 2024).

Unique antecedents of access-based services in specific product/service categories have also been discussed. For example, in the fashion category, styling proposals by platform companies (Park & Armstrong, 2019b) and access to formal wear for special occasions such as weddings (Pantano & Stylos, 2020) have been identified as antecedents, while in the luxury product category, enabling conspicuous consumption at a lower cost than ownership (Gong et al., 2022) has been identified as an antecedent.

2.  Social factors

The second category of antecedents is social factors. In the sharing economy, where consumers also play the role of service providers, there is an interaction between consumers as service customers and consumers as service providers (for example, on Airbnb, hosts welcome guests into their own homes). Social factors arising from this interaction are also antecedents of consumer choice in the sharing economy.

Building social relationships with consumers who become service providers is an influential factor in consumers’ choice of the sharing economy. Originally, building social relationships was an important factor in sharing. Belk (2014) argued that this is related to the lending and borrowing of goods between acquaintances without going through the market. However, even in the sharing economy, which involves the transfer of economic value, building social relationships is valued (Stofberg & Bridoux, 2019).

In the sharing economy, complete strangers often become service providers. Therefore, consumers, as service customers, need to examine whether providers are trustworthy. In previous studies, the similarity and attractiveness of providers (Kim & Jin, 2023), the service flexibility and service knowledge of providers (Xiang et al., 2022), and consumers’ beliefs in the justification of the economic system (Cakanlar & Ordabayeva, 2023) were identified as factors that determine the evaluation of others.

In the sharing economy, virtual interaction between consumers in the form of non-face-to-face communication is realized. An important concept in virtual communication is social presence, which represents the extent to which others are perceived as “real people.” If consumers can perceive the presence of faceless others as real, their participation in the sharing economy increases (Woo et al., 2024).

It is also important to determine whether consumers can recognize reciprocity and evaluate whether the return (output) on their own contribution (input) is fair compared with that of others in the sharing community. To recognize reciprocity, it is necessary to enhance the sense of community (Davlembayeva et al., 2021).

3.  Psychological factors

The third category of antecedents is psychological factors. Previous research has explored the impact of consumers’ psychological characteristics and psychological responses to new services on their choice of access-based services.

The characteristic of freedom from the responsibility and burden of ownership and the ability to access desired products evokes positive emotions in consumers. Prior studies have identified these positive emotions as an influential factor and an intrinsic motivation for choosing access-based services (e.g., Kim & Yoon, 2021).

Openness to consumption is also important. This concept represents the extent to which consumers are tolerant of diverse product and service options (Nie et al., 2022). Consumers with a high level of openness actively adopt access as a new option. Nie et al. (2022) identified consumer identity (global vs. local) as a factor that influences consumption openness.

Variety-seeking tendencies and novelty-seeking tendencies are also claimed to influence the choice of access-based services. Consumers with a high tendency toward variety-seeking prefer the new form of consumption because access-based services enable them to use various products without owning them (Park & Armstrong, 2019b). Consumers with a high novelty-seeking tendency, who prefer innovative products and become excited about pursuing new things, also prefer access-based consumption rather than conventional consumption, which presumes ownership (Ni, 2021).

Furthermore, it has been argued that consumers with a high materialistic tendency who feel happy being surrounded by and using many material things prefer services that allow them to easily access multiple products (Davidson et al., 2018).

Psychological ownership of luxury brands has also been mentioned as an antecedent of the choice of access-based services. While research claims that psychological ownership promotes access-based luxury consumption (Kumar, 2024), other studies indicate that consumers evaluate the access-based services of attached brands negatively (Wei et al., 2022).

Past service usage experience is also an antecedent of consumers’ choice of access-based consumption. Previous experience using access-based services reduces consumers’ perceived risk and increases their likelihood of choosing a similar form of consumption in the future (Małecka et al., 2022).

4.  Technological factors

The fourth category of antecedents is technological factors. The technological aspects of digital platforms have been discussed as antecedents of consumer choice of access-based services in previous studies.

First, the system quality of the platform has been mentioned as an antecedent. System quality refers to the ability of a platform to meet the functional and usage requirements of consumers. The ease of use and convenience of the application/website have been considered antecedents of the choice of the sharing economy and access-based services (e.g., Baek & Oh, 2021; Lo et al., 2020).

The impact of the information quality of the platform has also been considered. Information quality refers to the quality of the information content output by the platform. Whether the platform can provide sufficient and appropriate information to consumers is an important criterion for judging information quality (Shang & Wu, 2022).

Furthermore, prior studies have examined the impact of the service quality of a platform. Service quality refers to the quality of support that consumers can obtain from the platform and support staff, which includes nonpersonal and personal services. Importantly, the platform should smoothly coordinate communication among consumers to increase service quality (Shang & Wu, 2022).

V.  Conclusion

This paper reviewed previous studies that identified the antecedents of consumers’ choice of services that provide consumers with access to products instead of ownership and classified these antecedents into four categories, (1) access-specific factors, (2) social factors, (3) psychological factors, and (4) technological factors, to provide an overview of research trends.

This paper highlights two directions for future research. First, future research should address the choice between ownership and access. Many of the prior studies reviewed here included consumers who had already used new services as survey respondents or experimental subjects. In reality, many consumers still choose to own products despite the new option of access. Therefore, it is necessary to address the choice of whether to own or access products and to accumulate research that explores the factors that influence this binary consumer choice (e.g., Bardhi & Eckhardt, 2017; Kitazawa & Ono, 2023).

In addition, studies have explored the antecedents of consumers’ choice of streaming services for intangible content as access-based services. Most of the previous studies examined in this review have discussed services in the accommodation, transportation, and fashion categories. This is thought to reflect the degree of practical popularity of services in these categories. However, despite the practical popularity of streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify as access-based services that replace ownership of DVDs and CDs, few studies have explored the antecedents of consumers’ choice of these services. Therefore, examining the antecedents of consumers’ choice of streaming services from the perspective of access-based services might be an interesting topic.

Acknowledgments

My sincere thanks go to Professor Akinori Ono (Keio University) for helpful discussions and valuable support that enhanced the quality of this work. I thank Claude, an AI assistant created by Anthropic, for refining the language of this paper. This work was supported by JST SPRING, grant number JPMJSP2123.

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Ryohei Kitazawa

R. Kitazawa is a Ph.D. student at the Graduate School of Business and Commerce, Keio University. He received an M.A. in business and commerce from Keio University in 2024. His research interests lie in consumer behavior.