Overview

Professor Zhang uses machine learning to address marketing problems that have arisen within the nascent sharing economy. She conducts rigorous analyses of structured and unstructured data generated by new sharing economy platforms to address important issues emerging in the sharing economy. Using data on the home sharing company Airbnb, Professor Zhang and colleagues have investigated the economic impact of using verified images (photos taken with an Airbnb professional photographer) to advertise a property on the platform. Her findings were featured in the article “How Much Is an Image Worth? Airbnb Property Demand Estimation Leveraging Large Scale Image Analytics.” In a related paper “Can Lower-quality Images Lead to Greater Demand on AirBnB?” Professor Zhang and her co-authors built structural models using Airbnb data to explore factors that influenced hosts’ decisions on what photographs to post, and explored policies that Airbnb can employ to improve hosts’ adoption of higher-quality photos and thereby improve profitability for both the hosts and Airbnb.