This study develops and validates a comprehensive sustainability framework for sharing-economy businesses (SEBs), positioning sustainability as an integrated managerial agenda rather than a set of isolated initiatives. Drawing on an extensive review of sustainability and sharing-economy literature, the framework consolidates environmental, social, economic, and technological dimensions and embeds them across three organizational levels: top management, middle management, and operational management. A structured three-phase research process was employed, comprising the identification and alignment of sustainability factors with sharing-economy business operations, the development of organization-aligned recommended solutions, and the integration of these solutions into a multi-level framework grounded in the sustainable project life-cycle perspective. The framework and proposed solutions were validated using the Delphi technique involving experts from academia, industry, government, platform operators, asset owners, and users. Consensus analysis based on median values, standard deviation, and interquartile range demonstrates strong convergence and stability of expert judgments across all validated items. The findings indicate that effective sustainability implementation in SEBs depends on clear differentiation of managerial roles, coordinated decision-making across organizational levels, and robust digital-platform capabilities that support trust, transparency, and governance. By bridging the gap between strategic intent and operational execution, the proposed framework provides an empirically grounded for platform-based organizations seeking to embed sustainability into governance structures and daily operations across diverse sharing-economy contexts. • Develops a sustainability framework for sharing-economy businesses. • Integrates four sustainability dimensions into one managerial model. • Clarifies roles across top, middle, and operational management. • Translates sustainability factors into actionable implementation solutions. • Validates the framework using a three-round Delphi process.
Khongkhoom et al. (Fri,) studied this question.