Tomorrow 3.0: Transaction Costs and the Sharing Economy (an excerpt)

Abstract

According to Michael Munger, there is some evidence of the Third Great Economic Revolution, which can be traced within two dimensions: the sharing economy and the brokerage economy. Although in many industries, these two dimensions are far from each other, in some spheres where they interact, their intersection results in extending the new economy. In his book, Prof. Munger describes the features of the sharing economy; entrepreneurship is oriented toward cuts of transactional expenses rather than production expenses, use of new basic program tools, a business running with the help of mobile intellectual equipment, and an internet connection. In turn, the emergence of a brokerage economy results from skills used to sell cuts of transactional costs, opening new opportunities for mutually gained exchanges that have not yet been perceived as commercial. The Journal of Economic Sociology publishes the first chapter, “The World of Tomorrow 3.0,” where the author describes key features of the new economy resulting from the Third Great Economic Revolution. It means that innovations with the usage of digital technologies come to the fore, allowing more intensive usage of durable goods and reducing the total number of circulated goods. As a result, the human experience turns out to be more important than the obtained things, thus changing the idea of private property dramatically.