Cooperative reactions on digital commercial house-sharing tourism, mobility, and digital product streaming platforms

Abstract

Airbnb, Uber, and Spotify are household names, nonetheless their negative socio-economic and urban effects are causing global disruption and protests resulting in the emergence of cooperative digital platforms as a reaction. The main research question of this thesis, therefore, asks how cooperative platforms aim to help eliminate these socio-economic and urban effects of commercial house-sharing tourism (Airbnb-Fairbnb), mobility (Uber-Cotabo), and digital product streaming platforms (Spotify-Resonate) in the context of the European and digital international market. To analyse this, the research further investigates 3 sub-questions related to the following topics: 1. The positive and negative socio-economic effect of current commercial platforms. 2. The reaction and potential of cooperative platforms. 3. The expectation of the development of these cooperative platforms on the currently commercially dominated digital market. The research expects that the commercial giants remain dominant on the market, minimal to no fundamental changes will be made to their business model regarding civil and governmental backlash. Furthermore, without changes in mainstream consumer behaviour, platform network effects, or triple and quadruple governmental helix structures and funding, Fairbnb, Cotabo, or Resonate cooperative alternatives cannot grow into genuine competitors to Airbnb, Uber, and Spotify respectively.