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Reselling, giving, swapping, short-term renting and lending are all models that can help to increase the usage duration of resource-consuming goods. They are part of a real sharing economy that is undergoing regeneration due to the development of digital technologies. Public authorities should build an economic and regulatory framework that is favourable to virtuous models. Sharing economy entrepreneurs should analyse and improve their environmental performance. Users have a particularly important role in the case of peer-to-peer models. Environmental impact depends heavily on user behaviour and on the values that drive their actions.

In The Prince of Evolution Dugatkin tells the story of the Russian prince, evolutionary theorist, and political radical Peter Alexeyevich Kropotkin whose Darwinian theory of mutual aid was the first to argue that cooperation was an integral part of natural selection. Dugatkin’s book is a précis on Kropotkin’s life and work, an overview that highlights the common theme of mutual aid in both his scientific and political ideas. The discoveries that Kropotkin made of glacial formations during the Quaternary Period in Russia were received with international acclaim and earned him invitations to join the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as a Cambridge University endowed chair in geology.

“Hima” means “protected place” in Arabic and aims at preserving special landscapes for the public. Middle Eastern environmentalists have established several new himas in Lebanon and are promoting the idea throughout the Middle East since they have positive effects on the communities.

Despite the worldwide domination of a few credit rating agencies, two not-for-profit rating providers announced their alliance. The agencies are Wikirating and Public Sector Credit Solutions (PSCS). They both use crowdsourcing techniques, thus aiming to improve credit ratings. Wikirating employs a technology similar to that of Wikipedia in order to gather and aggregate information and views about credit quality for multiple categories of bonds. PSCS has provided an open source software tool which is used to calculates default probabilities for government bonds. It also has fully transparent sample models and data sets.

Lynn Stout's book, The Shareholder Value Myth, discusses the pervasiveness of the concept of “shareholder value”. Intellectual fashion and law as basis of the concept are examined. The controversial relationship between a corporation and its shareholders is an important topic in the book as well.

Read more on: http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/book-of-the-day-shareholder-value-myth/201...