The Sharing Economy and the Challenges of Internationalization

We study the internationalization challenges of sharing economy firms with an in-depth case comparison of Airbnb and Uber. These leading sharing economy companies have engaged in aggressive global expansion efforts, and in the process, have faced strong pushback from different stakeholders across many of the foreign countries they have entered. As a result, they offer an instructive opportunity to examine the relevance of existing internationalization theories to industries that have adopted the innovative business models of the sharing economy. We show that these companies’ business models insulate them from some of the internationalization challenges identified in the global strategy literature, but create others that have not been identified before. We also develop propositions concerning how these challenges impact these companies’ processes of internationalization. We conclude by discussing the findings’ relevance for research in global strategy and identify promising future research avenues.