Investigating the Impact of Professional and Nonprofessional Hosts’ Pricing Behaviors on Accommodation-Sharing Market Outcome

Nonprofessional hosts in the P2P accommodation-sharing markets have been demonstrated to be inferior in pricing. The sharing market is increasingly recruiting more professional hosts but is bothered by the disharmony from nonprofessionals’ feelings of being cast aside in this drive. To respond to this practice and disharmony, we develop a modeling framework with price-sensitive customers and earning-based hosts to investigate how varying ratios of professional and nonprofessional hosts affect pricing and impact sharing-market outcomes according to contemporary and long-term success indicators. This study is one of the first attempts to examine whether more professional hosts as supply decision makers is more beneficial to the sharing market. Numerical experiments for model analysis led to two primary managerial implications. A high ratio of professional hosts does not necessarily maximize indicators of hosts’ earnings, platform’s profit, or supply size, indicators that measure the accommodation-sharing market’s contemporary and long-term success. In addition, the market improves with magnified differences in the unique features of two types of hosts and they can cater to customers’ experiences and expectations, differentiating the market positioning of the two types of hosts.