We study the effect of Airbnb’s smart-pricing algorithm on the racial disparity in the daily revenue earned by Airbnb hosts. Our empirical strategy exploits Airbnb’s introduction of the algorithm and its voluntary adoption by hosts as a quasi-natural experiment. Among those who adopted the...

Collaborative consumption takes many forms, including car sharing, community gardens, credit unions and toy libraries. While these phenomena are arguably reshaping the marketplace, to this point, we lack a way to harmonize these diverse systems under a single umbrella or to connect them to prior...

In this chapter, I argue that to build an appropriate framework for understanding collaborative consumption in its contemporary form, we need to consider the deep and nuanced literature on human cooperation as well as work specific to modern sharing systems. Though it is beyond the scope of this...

The entry of flexible-capacity sharing economy platforms (e.g., Airbnb and Uber) has potentially changed the competitive landscape in traditional industries with fixed- capacity incumbents and volatile demand. Leveraging panel data on hotels and Airbnb, we study how the sharing economy...

This paper examines the impact of Airbnb on the local rental housing market. Airbnb provides landlords an alternative opportunity to rent to short-term tourists, potentially causing some landlords to switch from long-term rentals, thereby affecting rental housing supply and affordability....