An Offer to Help: Impacts of Covid-19 Lockdown on Local Sharing Economies

Background: The preventive measures applied in response to the covid-19 pandemic have transformed social and economic activities. With restrictions on physical interactions, the peer-to-peer (p2p) sharing economy offers a safer way for people to communicate and help each other. It is therefore relevant to investigate how the pandemic has impacted local digital sharing practices.Objective: The objective is to better understand how sudden introductions of social distancing policies, such as lockdowns, affect the usage of p2p sharing economy platforms. For that purpose, we have conducted a case study of the Norwegian digital sharing platform Nabohjelp (English: Neighbour help).Methods: The study follows a mixed-methods research design making use of both qualitative and quantitative methods. The data includes all messages posted by users on the Nabohjelp platform over a period covering one month before and two and a half months after the announcement of the first covid-19 lockdown in Norway. Statistical analysis of all messages (N=14997) is applied to understand the impact of the lockdown on different types of platform activities. Text analysis is performed on a stratified random sample of messages (n=400) to provide detailed insights into the content of the messages.Results : We find evidence of a rapid response to the lockdown and highly increased app usage, as well as increased technology adoption rates, in the first five weeks of lockdown. Before the lockdown, the messages were mainly related to specific needs with a short deadline, while messages during the lockdown were more open-ended and general in nature. We find an initial spike in the number of messages from people offering to help others, driven by both pre-existing and new users. When society gradually opened up again after about two months, the daily number of posted messages remained about three times higher than before the lockdown.Conclusion: Nabohjelp proved to be a useful channel for facilitating critical support at the local level during the lockdown. The case illustrates how digital p2p sharing platforms can make societies more robust by connecting people without the need to meet physically. The finding is remarkable because the app was not intended for crisis management, and the results adds new knowledge to the emerging literature on the role of the sharing economy in crises. We conclude that digital sharing platforms can play an important role in the robustness of local societies in times of a pandemic.