Abstract:

   As a road to sustainable development, sharing economy has great growth potential and special growth law. However, how to measure and evaluate the sustainability of the sharing economy industry and grasp the law of sustainable development of the sharing economy industry is still very limited. On the one hand, existing studies focus on the external sustainability of individual industries, provinces, cities or countries, ignoring the characteristics of cross-industry, cross-regional, multi-agent participation in the sharing economy, and the sustainability of industry performance in the sharing economy; there is a lack of literature on industry sustainability measurement and evaluation, and there are differences in the effect between the two evaluation paths based on the content of user reviews generated on social media and the actual performance of the industry, which will lead to cognitive dislocation, investment misjudgment and policy failure.

     This paper mainly studies the following aspects: (1) systematically combing the current research situation of sharing economy sustainability evaluation at home and abroad; (2) based on social perception and objective performance, using text mining and quantitative analysis to construct the basic framework to measure the sustainability evaluation of multiple industries of sharing economy; and (3) through the online mining of 29771 user evaluation data on social media in China and the collection of industry statistics, we empirically measure the sustainability of the sharing economy industry, compare its differences and explain the reasons.

       It is found that the public does not think that the sharing economy industry has significant overall sustainability, and the sustainability of the actual performance of the industry is very different from that of the public. Further, limited by subjective cognitive ability, the public believes that the sustainability of the sharing economy mainly comes from the observable dimensions of the external economy and external ecology of the industry. But objective performance shows that the economic and external technical advantages of the sharing economy industry are the important support for its sustainability. In addition, the difference between the two evaluation is most prominent in the industry where the internal process of capacity sharing such as accommodation and medical treatment is not easy to be observed by the public.

     Based on the above conclusions, this paper integrates the process framework of "social perception, objective performance, consistency difference", and provides countermeasures and suggestions for platform enterprises, investors and other stakeholders, government agencies and other subjects, to provide theoretical and practical guidance for the sustainability evaluation of sharing economy. This paper expands the theory of sharing economic sustainability, makes up for the deficiency of evaluation theory, and provides empirical evidence for the cognitive difference of sharing economic sustainability.

Key words: sharing economy, sustainability, social perception, objective performance, consistency