管科系系列讲座第233期预告

时　间：2019年5月28日（周二）10:00

地　点：史带楼302

主持人：官辉琪助理教授

主讲嘉宾：Saibal Ray is the James McGill Professor of Supply Chain Management in the Desautels Faculty of Management in McGill University and a member of the Royal Society of Canada College of New Scholars.

Title：Short-term Housing Rentals and Corporatization of Peer-to-Peer Platforms

Abstract: Owner-customer interactions on online short-term housing rental platforms are going through a significant transformation. While it traditionally involved individual owners dealing with individual customers in a peer-to-peer (P2P) form, these platforms have recently experienced an influx of corporate players on the supply side who control multiple assets that they rent out to customers; in effect, P2P platforms are morphing into business-to-consumer (B2C) ones. To understand the implications of this phenomenon, which we term as corporatization, for relevant stakeholders, in this work we develop a game-theoretical model with two different pricing strategies to capture the differences between P2P and B2C schemes. We show that when a P2P platform changes to a B2C one, it (i) increases the asset prices and the asset supply to the platform, but lowers asset utilization; and (ii) increases profits for asset owners and decreases surpluses for consumers. Data from Airbnb for multiple cities around the world seems to support some of our findings. We also extend our model in various ways to show that our results are relatively robust. An important social implication of our analysis is that the change in the nature of interaction between owners and customers due to the entry of B2C players might result in a capacity loss in the long-term rental market that should be of concern to policymakers (as is evident from the popular press). This paper also suggests how the platform provider should modify its strategy in the face of this phenomenon and how policymakers can most effectively deal with it so that the long-term rental channel is not too adversely affected.

管理科学系

2019-5-21