Research Seminar
Seminar: Short-term Housing Rentals and Corporatization of Platform Pricing
| Abstract: | In this paper, we model an online platform for short-term rentals of housing assets and analyze how a change in the pricing strategy due to the growing influx of corporate players to the platform affects the performance and payoffs of stakeholders. Many short-term online house rental platforms like Airbnb started off by facilitating Peer-to-Peer (P2P) matching between individual house owners and visitors with the aim of creating surplus for both supply and demand sides. However, recently, concerns have been raised about the growing prevalence of corporate players who control a significant number of housing assets on such platforms as well as about the increasing scarcity in the long-term rental market due to capacity being diverted to sharing platforms—a phenomenon we term as “crowding-out”. In this paper, we show that corporatization potentially has: (i) a direct effect on the stakeholders of such platforms by changing its objective from maximizing the number of matches to maximizing profit; and (ii) that this change in the objective and the resulting impact on performance might be one of the driving factors behind the capacity scarcity seen in the long-term rental market. |
| Date: | Jul 24 (Tue), 2018 11:00 am - 12:30 pm |
| Time: | 11:00AM - 12:30PM |
| Speaker: |
Dr. Han Zhu McGill University |
| Venue: | Room 7-208, 7/F, Lau Ming Wai Academic Building |
+852 3442-8989
+852 3442-0151
