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

2008年，在金融危机之后，一系列众包平台(Airbnb、Uber、Lyft等)形成了一个现在估计价值数十亿美元的产业，通常被描述为共享经济。由于共享经济中的公司涉及一系列服务，而且它们的平台变得非常受欢迎，当地的参与者和组织现在正就其对其他市场和监管政策的影响展开政治斗争。这种有争议的政治让人们对共享经济平台的可行性产生了质疑，因为城市政策制定者正在考虑修改地方法规，以适应这些平台，或者在某些情况下完全禁止它们。大多数关于新市场发展的研究要么集中在促进市场出现的社会结构上，要么集中在使市场适应现有规范和规则所涉及的政治方面。这个项目综合了这两个不同的视角，来考察共享经济中最大的市场之一--短期租赁或房屋共享？该部门是在其他地方结构和政治的背景下发展起来的。这项研究的发现将展示来自当地分享经济市场的新的权力配置。这些发现还将有助于公众就分享经济、市场监管、游说和市政府透明度进行对话和政策讨论。本研究将定性调查的丰富性与计算方法和定量方法的范围相结合。具体地说，它分析了来自短期租赁网站、人口普查局、非营利组织和美国300个城市和大都市地区酒店的定量数据。它还将使用研究人员收集的新的和原始的数据，包括关于市政预算和短期租赁条例的数据集，以及来自洛杉矶短期租赁案例研究的采访、历史和参与者观察数据。在这样做的过程中，它扩展了对市场的学术理解，以解释市场出现的地方和组织背景如何也塑造了监管方面的政治。此外，在这些过程中，它还考虑了共享经济市场的独特资源和政治群体--人群。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.