Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production

The world's fastest supercomputer and the second-largest commuter transportation system in the United States function on a resource- management model that is not well specified in contemporary economics. Both SETI@home, a distributed computing platform involving the computers of over four million volunteers, and carpooling, which accounts for roughly one-sixth of commuting trips in the United States, rely on social relations and an ethic of sharing, rather than on a price system, to mobilize and allocate resources. Yet they coexist with, and outperform, price-based and government-funded systems that offer substitutable functionality. Neither practice involves public goods, network goods, or any other currently…