As cities debate how to regulate Airbnb and other home-sharing services, we study the impacts of home sharing on local residential real estate markets. By accommodating transient travelers with short-term rental properties, home-sharing platforms have evolved as a major alternative channel that attracts the growing supply of residential properties. However, on the demand side of local residential markets, home-sharing platforms are not a viable option for residents. To demonstrate this dynamic between home sharing and local residential markets, we leverage a unique quasi-experiment on Airbnb—a platform policy that caps the number of properties a host can manage in a city—and find that the policy reduced rents (in the long-term rental markets) and home values (in the for-sale housing markets) by about 3% and did not affect the price-to-rent ratio. Consistent with the conjecture, we find that the policy impacts can be attributed to increased supply in local residential markets because of the policy. Quantitatively, our estimates suggest that, if the density of affected Airbnb properties is 1% higher in a market, the policy may further decrease rents and home values by about 0.03%–0.06%, which is similar across each policy-affected city. Our empirical findings add to the debate about the impacts of home sharing on local residential markets with a novel data set and a unique identification strategy. Practically speaking, our research is a timely response to the debate on regulating home sharing and has implications for various stakeholders of the residential real estate markets. This paper was accepted by Chris Forman, information systems.

Flourish or Perish? The Impact of Technological Acquisitions on Contributions to Open-Source Software This study examines how acquisitions of open-source software (OSS) firms may impact the internal and external contributors to the OSS projects of acquisition targets. We find that, for target firms, acquisitions hurt internal contributions from their employees to their OSS projects but attract more external contributions from outside developers. Therefore, managers of merged entities should strive to maintain the incentives of target firms’ internal developers after acquisitions, and they can also leverage acquisitions to attract external developers. We also find that acquirers with prior OSS experiences and similar OSS projects with target firms are in an advantageous position to attract contributions from both target firms’ internal developers and external developers in the OSS community. In this regard, managers of acquirers can consider building their OSS experiences and selecting appropriate target firms before acquisitions. Moreover, our study suggests that acquisitions of OSS firms can also benefit the whole OSS community by motivating the contributions of internal and external developers to other projects in the community. Therefore, for both practitioners and policy makers, acquisitions should have important implications for nourishing the entire OSS community.

We study professional players and their roles in peer-to-peer (P2P) markets. Most notably, P2P home-sharing platforms (e.g., Airbnb) consist of both professional hosts and nonprofessional individual hosts. What are the roles of the professionals? Should home-sharing platforms regulate their participation? Professional hosts may primarily offer properties that nonprofessional hosts would not supply and attract more guests—the differentiation effect. Or they may mostly supply similar properties and compete with the nonprofessionals—the competition effect. Using a unique data set of Airbnb listings, we first find that professional hosts’ properties are more expensive and have superior characteristics than nonprofessionals’. Second, we capitalize on a quasi-experiment in which Airbnb capped the number of properties a host can manage in several cities in the United States to determine the roles of professional hosts. With different predictions (about the policy impacts) under the differentiation versus competition effects, we find evidence suggesting the dominance of the latter. In particular, the policy increased the supply from nonprofessional hosts, and the price level of nonprofessional properties as a group went up after the policy. However, our findings of heterogeneity in policy impacts suggest that the dominance of competition is less prominent in certain markets. Finally, we find that the platform was not worse off in attracting reservations or securing revenue after the policy. Our findings contribute to both theory and practice as they reveal the roles of professional players and how P2P platforms can manage their participation. This paper was accepted by Kartik Hosanagar, information systems.