BlueSky Thinking Summary

Perhaps one of the biggest decisions hosts make in a peer-to-peer setting—think Airbnb, Turo—is to list early or not.

Achal Bassamboo and Neha Sharma of Kellogg have delved into just such a dynamic, with an eye toward how seller listing behaviors shape platform economics.

The authors' experiment demonstrates that, as time goes on, the delay in listing ends up making the hosts maximize short-term gains at lower availability and hence lesser earnings for the hosts and the platform.

In fixing this, the study proposes incentivizing early listings through higher payouts, optimizing outcomes for all players.

This improves by far the efficiency of the platforms, all the while bringing less disruption to the service for renters in search of timely booking.

It therefore underlines how the rebalancing of host incentives with dynamic market demands must be at the core of driving revenues in a sustainable manner as these insights reshape platform strategies in the burgeoning sharing economy.