ABSTRACT
Renting is a fairly common practice for consumers who want to make use for a limited period of time of products they do not want to own. In the case of renting, the owner offers the use of a product for a certain amount of time for a certain price. For Germany no general statistics on renting practices exist, making a quantitative assessment of renting behaviour difficult. From an economic point of view, the renting of vehicles dominates the field, followed by information and communication technology and sports equipment. In the Netherlands, more than 100,000 companies offer renting services. In Spain, short-term renting is common to cover limited demand for certain products and services. The most important product in this context is cars, with short-term car rental widely introduced in the market and consisting of more than 100,000 vehicles. Financial motives usually seem very important in the decision to lease instead of buy.
