This paper examines the sharing economy as an advanced model of interaction between economic agents that helps them mitigate resource constraints and rapidly meet producers’ and consumers’ needs in the face of new challenges. We found the benefits of collaborative consumption, or sharing, to be largely determined by the level of trust in society, development of technological base and adaptation of legal framework to digital transformation of the national economy. Based on the evidence from Russia and Brazil, we classify the factors that determine the sharing economy development and identify effective instruments of regulating sharing relations. The results indicate that regulatory “sandboxes” appear to be most appropriate as they allow participants to test innovations of substantial public importance that lie outside the scope of existing legislative norms.