A global-scale analysis of the sharing economy model – an AirBnB case study

The sharing economy model has changed the way in which people engage in a variety of activities, including travelling, trading, working, and lending/borrowing money. Several studies exist that aim to understand, quantify and model such phenomenon, but most such studies are geographically focused on countries in the Western World. Knowledge about the penetration and adoption of this novel market model in non-Western countries is much more limited, and almost completely lacking when it comes to emerging markets, where it was touted to bring the biggest benefits and be a game changer to uplift people economically. To close the gap, we chose Airbnb as an example of sharing economy model with worldwide market penetration, and performed a large-scale quantitative study of its penetration and adoption in seven cities in Asia, five cities in Latin America. We compared findings against seven cities in the Western World, and observed patterns to be similar across all locales, with two notable exceptions: the geographic penetration of such services, and the experience that guests travelling to such destinations shared in their reviews.