Do Incentives to Review Help the Market? Evidence from a Field Experiment on Airbnb

The authors thank Dean Eckles, Chiara Farronato, Shane Greenstein, John Horton, Caroline Hoxby, Xiang Hui, Ramesh Johari, Garrett Johnson, Tobias Klein, Jon Levin, Tesary Lin, Mike Luca, Steve Tadelis, Catherine Tucker, Giorgos Zervas, and Olivia Natan as well as seminar participants at Microsoft, the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (2015), National Bureau of Economic Research Summer Institute, Conference on Digital Experimentation, The Workshop on Information Systems and Economics, Marketing Science (2021), and the University of Rochester for comments. They thank Elena Grewal and Riley Newman for giving them the initial opportunity to work on this project, Matthew Pearson for early conversations about the project, and Peter Coles and Mike Egesdal for their tireless efforts in helping this paper be approved. The views expressed in this paper are solely the authors’ and do not necessarily reflect the views of Airbnb, Inc. The authors were employed by Airbnb, Inc., for part of the time that this paper was written and have held stock that may constitute a material financial position. Andrey Fradkin was an employee of Airbnb between 2012 and 2016 and is currently an unpaid contractor. He has previously held a material financial interest in Airbnb, Inc. David Holtz was an employee of Airbnb between 2015 and 2016 and is currently an unpaid contractor. He currently holds a material financial interest in Airbnb, Inc. Airbnb, Inc. had the right to review the paper subject to the following stipulations:Delaying disclosure or publication until any intellectual property rights have been adequately protected.Removing Airbnb confidential information from the work product.Compliance with Airbnb’s obligations as it relates to applicable laws, including the Data Protection Law, security laws, confidentiality requirements, and contractual commitments.Adding an appropriate disclosure concerning Airbnb’s support of the project.