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Peer-to-Peer Networks

By Alex Lassar and Elizabeth Kluger Cooper

A widely repeated story concerns a man (let's call him Henry) who, on the recommendation of a friend, decided to list on an obscure apartment-sharing website called “Airbed and Breakfast” a very elaborate treehouse he originally built for his then off-to-college son. Today, Henry's treehouse is one of the more popular destinations on a marketplace that boasts over 250,000 properties in 192 countries (there is often a seven-week waiting list for the treehouse). In fact, Henry has since paid off the mortgage on his real house through the proceeds garnered through the Airbed and Breakfast site at www.Airbnb.com.

Airbnb is today a $10B company riding the wave of collaborative consumption, a closet industry that is the modern manifestation of traditional barter marketplaces. By tapping into the inherent efficiency of today's increasingly connected world, peer-to-peer collaborative consumption threatens to shake the pillars of traditional and institutional marketplaces and exchanges such as financial markets (peer-to-peer lending), automotive dealers (peer-to-peer car-sharing), and transportation (peer-to-peer ride-sharing such as lyft.com or uber.com).

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