Service Providers of the Sharing Economy

Abstract

Many "sharing economy" platforms, such as Uber and Airbnb, have become increasingly popular, providing consumers with more choices and suppliers a chance to make profit. They, however, have also brought about emerging issues regarding regulation, tax obligation, and impact on urban environment, and have generated heated debates from various interest groups. Empirical studies regarding these issues are limited, partly due to the unavailability of relevant data. Here we aim to understand service providers of the sharing economy, investigating who joins and who benefits, using the Airbnb market in the United States as a case study. We link more than 211 thousand Airbnb listings owned by 188 thousand hosts with demographic, socio-economic status (SES), housing, and tourism characteristics. We show that income and education are consistently the two most influential factors that are linked to the joining of Airbnb, regardless of the form of participation or year. Areas with lower median household income, or higher fraction of residents who have Bachelor's and higher degrees, tend to have more hosts. However, when considering the performance of listings, as measured by number of newly received reviews, we find that income has a positive effect for entire-home listings; listings located in areas with higher median household income tend to have more new reviews. Our findings demonstrate empirically that the disadvantage of SES-disadvantaged areas and the advantage of SES-advantaged areas may be present in the sharing economy.

Between enthusiasm and refusal: A cluster analysis on consumer types and attitudes towards peer‐to‐peer sharing

“…Recent work has found that young and well‐educated individuals are overrepresented among active users. On average, users have rather low income and tend to be rather male than female (European Commission, ; Ke, ; PwC, ).…”

“…On average, users have rather low income and tend to be rather male than female (European Commission, 2017; Ke, 2017;PwC, 2015).…”

“…Yet only few studies have examined consumer types in the field of the sharing economy and P2P platforms (see for instance Guttentag, Smith, Potwarka, & Havitz, 2017;Hellwig, Morhart, Girardin, & Hauser, 2015;Lawson, Gleim, Perren, & Hwang, 2016;Tussyadiah & Zach, 2017). Overall, recent reports suggest that the main target audience of sharing schemes is represented by comparatively young, well-educated, budget-constrained, technology-affine, and urban users (European Commission, 2017; Ke, 2017;PwC, 2015). From a methodological perspective, cluster analysis hence represents a viable means to identify and differentiate consumer segments on sharing platforms.…”

Algorithmic Anxiety and Coping Strategies of Airbnb Hosts

“…A number of recent studies in HCI on monetized network hospitality have examined the hospitality exchange processes that take place via Airbnb [22,24,25,28,30,34,41]. Ma et al studied the type of content that Airbnb hosts self-disclose in their profiles and showed that hosts optimize their disclosures for trustworthiness by revealing more assessment signals than conventional ones [30].…”

Constructing Urban Tourism Space Digitally

“…Studies exist that look into hosts' motivation to participate in online hospitality networks [73,121]. Such research approaches deal with drivers for renting out [70,73,121] and analyze the importance of monetary transactions in hospitality exchange networks [66]. Other studies were concerned with hosts' trustworthiness [48,83].…”