392 / 2024-04-24 22:04:15

Sharing Me the Way for Climate Change Mitigation: An Empirical Investigation of the Sharing Economy and Sustainable CO2 Emission

Climate change, CO2 emission, product-sharing platform, institutional theory, transaction cost economics

Problematizing the assumption that government-driven top-down decarbonization policies are effective in climate change mitigation, we propose that decarbonization policies can be complemented by technology-driven bottom-up business models in reducing CO₂ emissions. We argue that the platform-based sharing economy provides a sustainable bottom-up pathway for climate change mitigation by leveraging collaborative consumption technologies to optimize the carbon footprints of idle resource reutilization. We compile a nationwide panel dataset that comprises Zhuanzhuan entries (about 40 million products from 15 million sellers) and CO₂ emissions for 335 Chinese cities from 2010 to 2019. Using a difference-in-differences (DID) approach, we find that Zhuanzhuan entry reduces CO₂ emissions by enhancing the reutilization efficiency of idle products away from the waste landfill and incineration stream (i.e., reutilization effect) and amplifying the awareness efficiency of broader carbon emission behaviors (i.e., awareness effect). Furthermore, we show that legal development and media coverage moderate the relationship between Zhuanzhuan entry and CO₂ emissions, as regions with stronger legal development and broader media coverage exhibit a greater reduction in CO₂ emissions following Zhuanzhuan entry. Our study enriches the literature by offering a novel bottom-up perspective to refresh the extant top-down assumption of climate change mitigation, providing research and practical implications to leverage the sharing economy for sustainable CO₂ emission reduction.