As the sharing economy is increasingly growing, various sharing business models have been widely adopted in practice. Some sharing platform firms provide their self-owned products in the market operating in a B2C (business-to-customer) sharing model in addition to the original customer-to-customer (C2C) sharing model. In this study, we develop an analytical framework to examine whether a C2C sharing platform firm launches its own sharing service in both a monopoly market and a supply chain setting. Customers in the market are naturally grouped into product owners and renters. We show that the platform firm does not always choose to launch the B2C sharing service, which significantly depends on the proportion of product owners of the C2C sharing product, the consumer acceptance level of the platform firm’s sharing product and the corresponding marginal production cost. We also find that the introduction of the B2C sharing service will always increase total consumer surplus and social welfare. Furthermore, we further investigate whether the platform firm launches the sharing service by offering its own product or procuring it from an upstream supplier, and extend our analysis to a N-period framework and demonstrate that our results are robust.

随着共享经济的日益增长，各种共享业务模型已在实践中被广泛采用。除了原始的客户对客户（C2C）共享模型外，一些共享平台公司还以B2C（企业对客户）共享模型在市场中提供其自有产品。在这项研究中，我们开发了一个分析框架，以检查C2C共享平台公司是否在垄断市场和供应链环境中都启动了自己的共享服务。市场上的客户自然分为产品所有者和租用者。我们表明，平台公司并非总是选择启动B2C共享服务，这在很大程度上取决于C2C共享产品的产品所有者的比例，平台公司共享产品的消费者接受程度以及相应的边际生产成本。我们还发现，引入B2C共享服务将始终增加总的消费者剩余和社会福利。此外，我们进一步调查平台公司是通过提供自己的产品还是从上游供应商购买产品来启动共享服务，并将我们的分析扩展到N周期框架，并证明我们的结果是可靠的。