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- September–October 2021
- Article
Frontiers: Can an AI Algorithm Mitigate Racial Economic Inequality? An Analysis in the Context of Airbnb
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Nitin Mehta, Param Singh and Kannan Srinivasan
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...
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- September 17, 2021
- Article
AI Can Help Address Inequity—If Companies Earn Users' Trust
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Kannan Srinivasan, Param Singh and Nitin Mehta
While companies may spend a lot of time testing models before launch, many spend too little time considering how they will work in the wild. In particular, they fail to fully consider how rates of adoption can warp developers’ intent. For instance, Airbnb launched a...
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- July 2021 (Revised August 2021)
- Supplement
Airbnb Emerges from the Pandemic: Lessons for Stakeholder Governance (B)
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Allison M. Ciechanover
As the COVID pandemic spread in early 2020, global travel ground to a halt. For Airbnb, the San Francisco-based platform for renting accommodations, the impact was both swift and severe as revenues plummeted more than 70% over the prior year. Responding to the sudden...
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Keywords:
Business and Stakeholder Relations;
Corporate Governance;
Crisis Management;
Leadership;
Two-Sided Platforms;
Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact;
Mission and Purpose;
Value Creation;
Decision Making;
Goals and Objectives;
Travel Industry;
Tourism Industry;
Service Industry;
United States
- May 2021 (Revised August 2021)
- Case
Airbnb During the Pandemic: Stakeholder Capitalism Faces a Critical Test
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Allison Ciechanover
As the COVID pandemic spread in early 2020, global travel ground to a halt. For Airbnb, the San Francisco-based platform for renting accommodations, the impact was both swift and severe as revenues plummeted more than 70% over the prior year. Responding to the sudden...
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Keywords:
Business and Stakeholder Relations;
Corporate Governance;
Crisis Management;
Leadership;
Two-Sided Platforms;
Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact;
Mission and Purpose;
Value Creation;
Decision Making;
Goals and Objectives;
Travel Industry;
Tourism Industry;
Service Industry;
United States
- March 2020
- Teaching Note
onefinestay: Building a Luxury Experience in the Sharing Economy
By: Jill Avery and Anat Keinan
onefinestay was a two-sided marketplace that offered high-end home rentals to travelers who sought a more authentic and local experience than a typical upscale hotel might provide. After five years of rapid growth, it was time to do a comprehensive analysis of the...
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Keywords:
Two-sided Marketplace;
Two-sided Market;
Hospitality Industry;
Hotels;
Luxury Brand;
Sharing Economy;
Startup;
Scaling;
Growth;
Customer Segmentation;
Brand Positioning;
Marketing;
Marketing Strategy;
Brands and Branding;
Luxury;
Entrepreneurship;
Business Startups;
Business Model;
Venture Capital;
Customers;
Segmentation;
Growth and Development Strategy;
Travel Industry;
Tourism Industry;
Accommodations Industry;
United Kingdom;
London;
Europe
- March 2020 (Revised May 2021)
- Case
Racial Discrimination on Airbnb
By: Michael Luca, Scott Stern, Devin Cook and Hyunjin Kim
Facing mounting criticism and evidence of widespread racial discrimination on the platform, apartment rental platform Airbnb needed to decide a path forward. For years, Airbnb had given hosts extensive discretion about whether to reject a guest after seeing little more...
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- 2020
- Book
The Power of Experiments: Decision-Making in a Data-Driven World
By: Michael Luca and Max H. Bazerman
Have you logged into Facebook recently? Searched for something on Google? Chosen a movie on Netflix? If so, you've probably been an unwitting participant in a variety of experiments—also known as randomized controlled trials—designed to test the impact of changes to an...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Design in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
By: Roberto Verganti, Luca Vendraminelli and Marco Iansiti
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is affecting the scenario in which innovation takes place. What are the implications for our understanding of design? Is AI just another digital technology that, akin to many others, will not significantly question what we know about...
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Keywords:
Artificial Intelligence;
Design Thinking;
Technological Innovation;
Design;
Change;
Theory
- 2020
- Book
Competing in the Age of AI: Strategy and Leadership When Algorithms and Networks Run the World
By: Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani
In industry after industry, data, analytics, and AI-driven processes are transforming the nature of work. While we often still treat AI as the domain of a specific skill, business function, or sector, we have entered a new era in which AI is challenging the very...
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- 2019
- Chapter
Agent Pricing in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from Airbnb
By: Jun Li, Antonio Moreno and Dennis Zhang
- 2018
- Working Paper
The Welfare Effects of Peer Entry in the Accommodation Market: The Case of Airbnb
By: Chiara Farronato and Andrey Fradkin
We study the effects of enabling peer supply through Airbnb in the accommodation industry. We present a model of competition between flexible and dedicated sellers - peer hosts and hotels - who provide differentiated products. We estimate this model using data from...
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- September 2017 (Revised November 2018)
- Case
Marriott International: The Next 90 Years
By: Chiara Farronato and Gary Pisano
The case examines how Marriott should respond to the potential threats from new home-sharing platforms and the rise of online travel agencies. In 2017 Marriott was the largest hotel chain, with more than one million rooms and 7% of worldwide room supply. In the...
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Keywords:
Airbnb;
Competitiveness;
Threats;
Disruption;
Lodging Industry;
Long-term Growth;
Loyalty Program;
Marriot;
Online Platforms;
Online Travel Agencies;
Two-Sided Platforms;
Disruptive Innovation;
Competitive Strategy;
Competition;
Customer Focus and Relationships;
Customer Satisfaction;
Online Technology;
Tourism Industry;
Travel Industry;
Accommodations Industry
- April 2017
- Article
Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment
By: Benjamin Edelman, Michael Luca and Daniel Svirsky
In an experiment on Airbnb, we find that applications from guests with distinctively African-American names are 16% less likely to be accepted relative to identical guests with distinctively White names. Discrimination occurs among landlords of all sizes, including...
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Keywords:
Discrimination;
Field Experiment;
Bias;
Airbnb;
Prejudice and Bias;
Race;
Accommodations Industry
- December 2016
- Article
Fixing Discrimination in Online Marketplaces
By: Ray Fisman and Michael Luca
Online marketplaces such as eBay, Uber, and Airbnb have the potential to reduce racial, gender, and other forms of bias that affect the off-line world. And in the early days of Internet commerce, the relative anonymity of transactions did make it harder for...
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- October 2016 (Revised March 2017)
- Case
Airbnb in Amsterdam (A)
By: Mitchell Weiss, Emer Moloney and Vincent Dessain
In February 2014, Amsterdam became the first city to issue new regulations specifically to allow home sharing. Airbnb's Molly Turner, global head of civic partnerships; her colleagues at the San Francisco–based home sharing platform; and her counterparts in Amsterdam's...
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Keywords:
Public Entrepreneurship;
Innovation;
Sharing Economy;
Amsterdam;
Airbnb;
Molly Turner;
Regulation;
Homesharing;
Tourism;
Business And Government;
Public-private Partnership;
Entrepreneurship;
Business and Government Relations;
Government Administration;
Public Sector;
City;
Tourism Industry;
Public Administration Industry;
Travel Industry;
Netherlands;
Europe
- October 2016
- Supplement
Airbnb in Amsterdam (B)
By: Mitchell Weiss, Emer Moloney and Vincent Dessain
In December 2014, Amsterdam and Airbnb announced an MOU to promote responsible home sharing and to simplify the payment of tourist tax for hosts in the city. It was the most comprehensive agreement that Airbnb had with any city in the world. Its final provision read,...
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Keywords:
Public Entrepreneurship;
Innovation;
Sharing Economy;
Amsterdam;
Airbnb;
Molly Turner;
Regulation;
Homesharing;
Tourism;
Business And Government;
Public-private Partnership;
Business and Government Relations;
Government Administration;
Public Sector;
City;
Urban Development;
Tourism Industry;
Public Administration Industry;
Travel Industry;
Netherlands;
Europe
- 2016
- Article
Peer-to-Peer Markets
By: Liran Einav, Chiara Farronato and Jonathan Levin
Peer-to-peer markets such as eBay, Uber, and Airbnb allow small suppliers to compete with traditional providers of goods or services. We view the primary function of these markets as making it easy for buyers to find sellers and engage in convenient, trustworthy...
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- September 2015
- Technical Note
The On-Demand Economy
By: Cynthia A. Montgomery, James Weber and Elizabeth Anne Watkins
This note describes the emerging on-demand economy, also referred to as the sharing economy. The note highlights several companies including Uber and Airbnb that exemplify this new mode of competition, a model that threatens to disrupt traditional firms. Uber provides...
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- March 2015 (Revised April 2015)
- Case
The Heat Is On: Emerging Ecosytems in the Thermostat Industry
By: David Collis and Ashley Hartman
Beth Wozniak, President of Honeywell Environmental and Combustion Controls (ECC) at Honeywell International Inc., spun around in her office chair, reflecting about how the classic, mature thermostat industry was rapidly evolving. In February 2014, Google paid $3.2...
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Keywords:
Honeywell;
Thermostats;
Internet Of Things;
Smart Thermostats;
Google;
Nest;
Apple;
HomeKit;
SmartThings;
Partnerships;
Platforms And Ecosystems;
Linkages;
Communication Protocols;
Strategy;
Technology;
Home Automation;
Connected Home;
Buildings and Facilities;
Energy;
Hardware;
Software;
Internet;
Technology Platform;
Partners and Partnerships;
Manufacturing Industry;
Industrial Products Industry;
Energy Industry;
Electronics Industry;
Consumer Products Industry