Pricing strategies on Airbnb: Are multi-unit hosts revenue pros?

By Linchi Kwok, Karen L. Xie. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 2018

121 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract This study examined the effects of pricing strategies, including price positioning and dynamic pricing, on an Airbnb listing’s revenue with a particular interest on the performance difference between multi-unit and single-unit hosts. A series of econometric analyses were performed using a dataset of 320,243 listings managed by 216,058 hosts in 10 major U.S. markets across a longitudinal period from October 2014 to July 2017. The results suggest while price positioning and dynamic pricing have positive impacts on an Airbnb listing’s revenue performance, a multi-listing host performs better than a single-listing host in driving a listing’s revenue, through (a) positioning a listing at a higher price than the average listing price in a neighborhood and (b) adopting less dynamic pricing strategies. Our study fills the void of pricing research in room-sharing economy literature and generates important insights about the pricing strategies and the consequent performance outcome between two different host types.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aea2fb7f7a9259456bb443009b7ff89636141c64