The motivation factors of non-ownership consumption

Abstract

There has been a rising trend that consumers choose to engage in consumption based on renting, swapping, sharing, bartering and gifting with the use of new technology and product-service systems, in the USA. We wanted to explore whether the same factors motivating such consumption is true for Norwegian consumers, and whether there is a potential for such services in the Norwegian market. The purpose of this master thesis is to investigate which factors motivate non-ownership consumption. We have studied Norwegian consumers of car sharing, music streaming and rental service of various goods where the users make transactions with each other. Our thesis is based on a literature study of previous research on non-ownership and productservice systems, and a qualitative study of Norwegian consumers. The qualitative study is a case study of users of three Norwegian product-service systems; Bildeleringen, Spotify and Sindro. The background for our model and research is mainly the articles and studies of Lawson (2011), Moeller and Wittkowski (2010), Durgee and O’Connor (1995) and Scholl (2008). We study seven motivation factors, put together by factors from the different theories mentioned above; simplicity orientation, perceived economic gain, variation and experience seeking, image orientation, environmentalism, trend orientation and exploration and trial. We also study impediments to non-ownership that might impair the motivation factors; the functional perspective (i.e. transaction costs, information economics, principal-agent issues and property rights) and the symbolic perspective (i.e. symbolic meaning of objects). Our results show that the consumers from our study are not motivated to engage in nonownership consumption by all the factors we started with. The revised model includes freedom from ownership, convenience orientation, perceived economic gain, environmentalism and testing. In addition, information economics (quality predictability) and transaction costs might serve as impediments to non-ownership consumption even though the motivation factors mentioned are present.