How sharing is the “sharing economy”? Evidence from 97 Airbnb markets

Digital platforms such as Airbnb have become a major economic and political force in recent years, presenting themselves as a “sharing economy”–a new, more just way of organizing social and economic activity–while functioning as owners and managers of proprietary markets. These platforms have in recent years been subject to variegated but growing regulations, begging questions of how these affect their platform markets. This paper examines these claims by a large-scale international comparative analysis of the revenue distribution of Airbnb markets in 97 cities and regions, focusing on the level and evolution of revenue inequality, and estimating the racial and gender revenue gaps by using machine learning classification of host profile pictures. Examining 834,722 listings, 513,785 hosts, and 13,466,854 reviews, the paper finds an average Gini coefficient of 0.68, implying that a majority of the market revenue tends to go to about 10% of the hosts. The level of centralization varies significantly across cities, but is consistently growing over time, with government regulation appearing as a counteracting factor, which however only temporarily slows down the growing dominance of a small minority of large-scale hosts. The paper furthermore finds large gender and race revenue gaps, as Black hosts receive on average 22% less revenue for their listings, and women an average of 12% less. These findings contribute important data to ongoing academic and policy debates, as well as a starting point for further research on inequality in the sharing economy, and how it can be regulated.