Democratizing the Opportunities: Who Benefits from the Airbnb Market?

Abstract

Peer-to-peer markets allow small suppliers to enter markets traditionally occupied by large firms and provide a potential decentralized distribution of opportunities. This paper investigates how these opportunities are distributed across agents and affected by government regulations. Using daily panel data of Airbnb rentals in Chicago, I develop an individual-level multinomial logit model to estimate consumer and producer surpluses across differentiated agents. The results find higher surpluses for low-income property owners but indicate a disproportionate concentration of welfare in high-income neighborhoods. The counterfactual analysis shows that restricting institutional hosts reinforces this concentration. However, increasing tax rates potentially helps redistribute welfare.