• A
  • A
  • A
  • ABC
  • ABC
  • ABC
  • А
  • А
  • А
  • А
  • А
Regular version of the site

Factors that Influence the Airbnb Listings’ Price

Student: Wang Jing

Supervisor: Angel Barajas

Faculty: St.Petersburg School of Economics and Management

Educational Programme: Management and Analytics for Business (Master)

Year of Graduation: 2020

Airbnb is the most successful business community in the lodging service market so far in the context of sharing economy. But unlike the hotels which have professional management and effective pricing ability, Airbnb not only has an unstable supplement to the market and the complex pricing strategies due to the various types of accommodation. The low-efficiency pricing ability of the hosts and lack of systematic management method has made Airbnb miss the large size of the financial benefits. The Internet has created an open market for the online business platform to exchange information with consumers. Thus, the hosts cannot set a higher price than the market price to earn extra benefits utilizing asymmetrical information. So how to guide the hosts to promote the pricing ability is particularly important. Based on the previous research, this paper applies the hedonic pricing model to study the factors affecting prices in the Madrid Airbnb market, including the inherent house attributes and customer satisfaction (rating score and customers’ comments). Since most of the previous articles only use a numerical rating score as the unique indicator of customer evaluation, which is not only inaccurate to describe the customer's complicated subjective feelings. This article introduces the sentiment analysis method to quantify the Airbnb online textual comments. This is a natural language processing algorithm that can extract and score emotional words in the text. The empirical results show that customer reviews have a more convincing effect on prices than ratings. In addition, this paper uses the analysis of variance to test the amenities variables and prices, as well as customer satisfaction. A little evidence has been found to state that the amenities are influential to the price, an indirect effect on the price and rating by virtue of the direct effect on the review comments.

Student Theses at HSE must be completed in accordance with the University Rules and regulations specified by each educational programme.

Summaries of all theses must be published and made freely available on the HSE website.

The full text of a thesis can be published in open access on the HSE website only if the authoring student (copyright holder) agrees, or, if the thesis was written by a team of students, if all the co-authors (copyright holders) agree. After a thesis is published on the HSE website, it obtains the status of an online publication.

Student theses are objects of copyright and their use is subject to limitations in accordance with the Russian Federation’s law on intellectual property.

In the event that a thesis is quoted or otherwise used, reference to the author’s name and the source of quotation is required.

Search all student theses