Abstract

Sharing economy platforms such as Airbnb, Turo and Swimply connect consumers with individuals who own idle resources and are willing to monetize their access. Such a decentralized platform must attract and retain participants not only on the demand side but also on the supply side. To optimally allocate its acquisition and retention efforts, a platform needs information about the incremental value added by each participant, as we know from the customer relationship literature. However, in the context of sharing economy platforms, usual methods to measure the value of customers fail because of externalities between participants: on the supply side, providers compete for transactions; on the demand side, different consumers cannot rent the same resource simultaneously.  In this talk, I will present structural methods to measure the incremental value of participants on both sides, in a way that accommodates substitution effects and capacity constraints. I will illustrate them by applying them to data from a French car-sharing platform.

Please contact dip.mkt@unibocconi.it if you wish to attend.