مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد قیمت گذاری یکسان اتاق – الزویر 2019

This research primarily contributes to the identification of the important variables that significantly influence room pricing on the Airbnb rental platform. The study adopted a comparative approach by using three different methods—OLS, random forest, and decision tree—and applied it to a vast amount of data from the Airbnb listing dataset of 11 US cities. Each individual amenity mentioned in the listing in the textual format was used as an independent variable. We also added six other common listing variables to obtain interesting insights into the influence of these variables from the perspective of the host, guest, traveler, and tourist. Apart from identifying city-specific variable importance using different models, we estimated a composite score of variable importance that may be helpful to generalize the influence of amenities and other explanatory variables in the presence of any city-specific regional heterogeneity on the shared rental platform.

Introduction

The global regression models used for investigating the influence of determinants on room pricing of Airbnb’s sharing accommodation mask the spatial heterogeneity of relations (Wang and Nicolau, 2017; Zhang et al., 2011). These models possibly overlook the presence of regional (or city-specific, in the case of Airbnb rentals) variations with respect to the important explanatory variables that significantly influence the room price of peer-to-peer accommodation. Pricing and revenue management are the two most frequently researched areas in the hospitality domain. Due to the theoretical and practical criticality of room pricing, Airbnb hosts must master room pricing to increase their profitability after satisfying guest expectations. Traditional corporate hotels and hotel chains, as well as peer-to-peer rentals, are easily searchable online. At the same time, in the absence of reputational corporate brand identity in Airbnb shared rentals, the hosts must provide some information for purposes of increasing the attractiveness of their property in terms of amenities and other pricing criteria, which are comparable and searchable. Thus, hosts in Airbnb not only fix their price but also decide the terms and conditions for providing room and services to improve their business and profits. On the other hand, guests are also at their liberty to select the property that is most economically advantageous and serves their need satisfactorily. Every day, thousands of guests select not to rent a traditional hotel room and instead spend the night in a room listed on peer-to-peer rentals by a stranger. In the literature of hospitality and tourism, studies have shown the increasing trend of novelty seeking and collaborative consumption on sharing rental platforms based on travel bragging items (Guttentag, 2015). Tourists and guests are looking for specific amenities items offered by the hosts on these platforms (Abrate and Viglia, 2017).