Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Local Structures and Politics of a Developing Short-Term Rental Market

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In 2008, on the heels of the financial crisis, a set of crowd-sourcing platforms (Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, etc.) emerged forming what is now estimated to be a multi-billion dollar industry, often described as the sharing economy. Because companies in the sharing economy span a range of services, and because their platforms have become hugely popular, local actors and organizations are now in a political struggle over the implications for other markets and regulatory policy. Such contentious politics have brought into question the viability of sharing economy platforms as city policymakers consider revising local regulations to accommodate the platforms or in some cases, banning them wholly. Most research on the development of new markets focuses either on the social structures that facilitate a market's emergence or on the politics involved to adapt it to existing norms and rules. This project synthesizes the two different perspectives to examine how one of the largest markets in the sharing economy, the short-term rental or ?home-sharing? sector, develops in the context of other local structures and politics. Findings from this research will show new configurations of power emerging from local sharing economy markets. These findings will also contribute to public conversation and policy discussions on the sharing economy, market regulation, lobbying and municipal government transparency. The research combines the richness of qualitative investigation with the scope of computational and quantitative methods. Specifically, it analyzes quantitative data from short-term rental websites, the Census, nonprofit organizations, and hotels for 300 U.S. cities and metropolitan areas. It will also use new and original data collected by the researchers, including a dataset on municipal budgets and short-term rental ordinances as well as interview, historical, and participant observation data from a case study of short-term rentals in Los Angeles. In doing so, it extends scholarly understandings of markets to account for the ways in which the local and organizational contexts in which markets emerge also shape the politics over their regulation. Additionally, it considers the distinct resource and political constituency of sharing economy markets--the crowd--in these processes.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.