Tilted Platforms: Rental Housing Technology and the Rise of Urban Big Data Oligopolies

Geoff Boeing, Max Besbris, David Wachsmuth and Jake Wegmann

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: This article interprets emerging scholarship on rental housing platforms -- particularly the most well-known and used short- and long-term rental housing platforms - and considers how the technological processes connecting both short-term and long-term rentals to the platform economy are transforming cities. It discusses potential policy approaches to more equitably distribute benefits and mitigate harms. We argue that information technology is not value-neutral. While rental housing platforms may empower data analysts and certain market participants, the same cannot be said for all users or society at large. First, user-generated online data frequently reproduce the systematic biases found in traditional sources of housing information. Evidence is growing that the information broadcasting potential of rental housing platforms may increase rather than mitigate sociospatial inequality. Second, technology platforms curate and shape information according to their creators' own financial and political interests. The question of which data -- and people -- are hidden or marginalized on these platforms is just as important as the question of which data are available. Finally, important differences in benefits and drawbacks exist between short-term and long-term rental housing platforms, but are underexplored in the literature: this article unpacks these differences and proposes policy recommendations.

Date: 2021-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-ict, nep-isf, nep-pay and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in Urban Transformations, 3, 6, 2021

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2108.08229 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Tilted Platforms: Rental Housing Technology and the Rise of Urban Big Data Oligopolies (2021)
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:arx:papers:2108.08229

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().