Share it or buy it? Exploring the effects of product brand attachment on commercial sharing services

• Consumers’ attachment to a product brand decreased their participation in a CSS to rent products of this brand. • Psychological ownership could mitigate the negative effect of brand attachment on CSS participation, especially when consumers feel like they “own” the shared products. • Self-contamination concerns, rather than hygienic concerns, conditionally mediated the negative effect of brand attachment on CSS participation. These results still hold in the post-pandemic era. Commercial sharing services (CSSs) provide consumers with temporary access to products or services. Consumers can use CSSs to communicate an identity by renting products from specific brands. Applying the theory of the extended self, we proposed an attachment-based account of CSS usage. Across four studies, we found consistent evidence that consumers were less likely to rent the products of their strongly attached brands via CSSs because these brands were regarded as part of their extended selves, and thus sharing these products with others would contaminate the self. However, this effect was mitigated when consumers’ psychological ownership of the shared product was augmented. Our findings reveal that psychological ownership can replace the role of actual ownership in the sharing context, rendering profound implications for understanding the relationships among self, brand, and product in sharing services.