| dc.description.abstract | The preventive measures applied in response to the covid-19 pandemic have transformed social and economic activities. Based on a case study of the Norwegian digital sharing platform Nabohjelp (English: Neighbour help), this article describes how sudden introductions of social distancing policies, such as lockdowns, affect the usage of peer-to-peer (p2p) sharing economy platforms. The analysis 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 (N=14997). Statistical analysis is applied to understand the impact of the lockdown on different types of platform activities, and text analysis is performed on a stratified random sample of messages (n=400). 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. We conclude that p2p sharing platforms can play an important role in the robustness of local societies in times of a pandemic. | en_US |
