Finance & DevelopmentJune 201657Arun SundararajanThe Sharing EconomyThe End of Employment and theRise of Crowd-Based CapitalismMIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts,2016, 256 pp., $26.95 (cloth).The sharing economy istransforming commerce rightbefore our eyes. Thousands areskipping the hassle of standing on acorner in the rain to hail a cab and aresimply summoning an Uber or Lyft towhisk them to the airport. Others areselling their knitting on Etsy, lettingstrangers stay in their home throughAirbnb, or having their weeds pulledby a gardener hired via TaskRabbit.Countless “workers” are flocking toAmazon’s Mechanical Turk to com-plete “Human Intelligence Tasks” forjust pennies.Sharing economy expert and NewYork University Stern School ofBusiness professor Arun Sundara-rajan tackles the myriad issues thesedevelopments have spawned in hispath-breaking book.Sundararajan knows his stuff. He’san award-winning scholar who writeswith a clarity that masks the com-plexity of his subject. Citing his ownresearch and that of many others, heexplains how organizations whosemain purpose is to create the supplyneeded to meet consumer demandare driving today’s economy. He ex-plores how these developments spell
