In A Market
Sharing disjoints the connection between usage and ownership of a product. Products are often sold because a buyer intends to use the product or the buyer intends to sell it to someone who will use it, thus sharing a product may reduce the product's demand by reducing the number of people who intend to acquire it to use it. Though sharing is touted as an economical and environmental aid to the public (carpooling, shared apartments, etc.), some businesses perceive it as a threat because of its assumed effect on their profitability. This has resulted in protection laws (such as copyright provisions denying owners the right to perform or display the work publicly) to curb sharing. The effect on profitability is difficult if not impossible to assess because it relies on making sweeping assumptions about public behavior including individual decision making differences, buyers only convinced to buy after using a friend's product, and the effect on the sales of products given away.
Sharing figures prominently in gift economies, but also can play a significant role in market economies, for example in car sharing. Share housing is a common and informally negotiated example of sharing of householders' labour (for example, in the form of housework).
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Famous quotes containing the word market:
“I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruit, but dollars; who loves not the beauty of his fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him till they are turned to dollars. Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)