Digital business system of sharing economy: How can European countries be segmented?

Abstract

Sharing economy, sometimes called collaborative consumption, is a concept, business model, and market in which individuals offer or rent their own assets which are not in use. Different types of sharing economy emerged from shared accommodation to sharing fashion items. No matter what is shared, the agreement on what is shared and under what circumstances is usually made via a website or platform within a digital ecosystem. The research question is how European countries can be segmented based on the characteristics of users of shared accommodation. The analysis was done on the Eurostat data from the ICT usage in households survey for 2019, while the applied segmentation (clustering) algorithm was k-means. The obtained results can be helpful in shedding light on how European countries can be grouped based on the characteristics of users of shared accommodation. It is believed that the research conducted in this study could act as a driver of further research on the topic of segmentation analysis of individuals and countries based on sharing economy activities.