Investigating the Impact of Professional and Nonprofessional Hosts’ Pricing Behaviors on Accommodation-Sharing Market Outcome

Ru Jia and Shanshan Wang
Additional contact information
Ru Jia: School of Computer Science, Inner Mongolia University, Huhhot 010010, China
Shanshan Wang: School of Economics and Management, Yan An University, Yan’an 716000, China

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 21, 1-16

Abstract: Nonprofessional hosts in the P2P accommodation-sharing markets have been demonstrated to be inferior in pricing. The sharing market is increasingly recruiting more professional hosts but is bothered by the disharmony from nonprofessionals’ feelings of being cast aside in this drive. To respond to this practice and disharmony, we develop a modeling framework with price-sensitive customers and earning-based hosts to investigate how varying ratios of professional and nonprofessional hosts affect pricing and impact sharing-market outcomes according to contemporary and long-term success indicators. This study is one of the first attempts to examine whether more professional hosts as supply decision makers is more beneficial to the sharing market. Numerical experiments for model analysis led to two primary managerial implications. A high ratio of professional hosts does not necessarily maximize indicators of hosts’ earnings, platform’s profit, or supply size, indicators that measure the accommodation-sharing market’s contemporary and long-term success. In addition, the market improves with magnified differences in the unique features of two types of hosts and they can cater to customers’ experiences and expectations, differentiating the market positioning of the two types of hosts.

Keywords: accommodation-sharing market; nonprofessional hosts; professional hosts; market outcomes; preference difference (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/21/12331/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/21/12331/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:21:p:12331-:d:674716

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().