The sharing economy is a new phenomenon considered to stimulate sustainable practices. It is viewed as the synergy between technology, information and marketing that promotes a new culture where customers favor access over ownership enabling them to use resources more efficiently. Therefore, it represents an innovative business model that can act as a potential pathway to sustainable economic development and energy efficiency. However, economic, and ecological impacts of the sharing economy remain controversial and need further investigation. In fact, sharing economy has disrupted the prevailing economic paradigm soliciting questions about the advantages and the risks of this new behavior. This study aims to fill this gap in the literature and quantitatively assesses the potential implications that the sharing economy has on sustainable economic development and energy efficiency. It builds a proxy indicator for the annual level of sharing economy use per country using internet search data from Google Trends. In addition, it uses annual secondary data for a balanced panel of 18 OECD countries for the period 2014–2018 to test the proposed models’ hypotheses. The positive impacts of the sharing economy on sustainable economic development and energy efficiency are supported by the results of the fixed effect regressions with Driscoll-Kraay standard errors. The findings suggest that the sharing economy represents a socio-economic trend that has the potential to stimulate sustainable economic development and energy efficiency. Therefore, they highlight the power of the sharing economy and offer important theoretical and practical implications for researchers, individuals, and policy makers.

共享经济是一种新现象，被认为可以刺激可持续做法。它被视为技术，信息和营销之间的协同作用，从而促进了一种新文化，在这种文化中，客户更偏爱于所有权而不是所有权，从而使他们能够更有效地使用资源。因此，它代表了一种创新的商业模式，可以作为实现可持续经济发展和能源效率的潜在途径。然而，共享经济的经济和生态影响仍然存在争议，需要进一步研究。实际上，共享经济已经破坏了流行的经济范式，引发了人们对这种新行为的优势和风险的质疑。本研究旨在填补文献中的空白，并定量评估共享经济对可持续经济发展和能源效率的潜在影响。它使用Google趋势中的互联网搜索数据为每个国家/地区的年度共享经济使用水平建立了代理指标。此外，它使用2014-2018年期间由OECD 18个国家组成的平衡小组的年度二手数据来检验提议模型的假设。带有Driscoll-Kraay标准误差的固定效应回归结果支持了共享经济对可持续经济发展和能源效率的积极影响。研究结果表明，共享经济代表着一种社会经济趋势，具有刺激可持续经济发展和能源效率的潜力。因此，