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Peer-to-peer markets, collectively known as the sharing economy, have emerged as alternative suppliers of goods and services traditionally provided by long-established industries. The authors explore the economic impact of the sharing economy on incumbent firms by studying the case of Airbnb, a prominent platform for short-term accommodations. They analyze Airbnb's entry into the state of Texas and quantify its impact on the Texas hotel industry over the subsequent decade. In Austin, where Airbnb supply is highest, the causal impact on hotel revenue is in the 8%-10% range; moreover, the impact is nonuniform, with lowerpriced hotels and hotels that do not cater to business travelers being the most affected. The impact manifests itself primarily through less aggressive hotel room pricing, benefiting all consumers, not just participants in the sharing economy. The price response is especially pronounced during periods of peak demand, such as during the South by Southwest festival, and is due to a differentiating feature of peerto-peer platforms--enabling instantaneous supply to scale to meet demand.

Consumer reviews are now part of everyday decision making. Yet the credibility of these reviews is fundamentally undermined when businesses commit review fraud, creating fake reviews for themselves or their competitors. We investigate the economic incentives to commit review fraud on the popular review platform Yelp, using two complementary approaches and data sets. We begin by analyzing restaurant reviews that are identified by Yelp’s filtering algorithm as suspicious, or fake—and treat these as a proxy for review fraud (an assumption we provide evidence for). We present four main findings. First, roughly 16% of restaurant reviews on Yelp are filtered. These reviews tend to be more extreme (favorable or unfavorable) than other reviews, and the prevalence of suspicious reviews has grown significantly over time. Second, a restaurant is more likely to commit review fraud when its reputation is weak, i.e., when it has few reviews or it has recently received bad reviews. Third, chain restaurants—which benefit less from Yelp—are also less likely to commit review fraud. Fourth, when restaurants face increased competition, they become more likely to receive unfavorable fake reviews. Using a separate data set, we analyze businesses that were caught soliciting fake reviews through a sting conducted by Yelp. These data support our main results and shed further light on the economic incentives behind a business’s decision to leave fake reviews. This paper was accepted by Lorin Hitt, information systems .

Many consumers base their purchase decisions on online consumer reviews. An overlooked feature of these texts is their narrativity: the extent to which they tell a story. The authors construct a new theory of narrativity to link the narrative content and discourse of consumer reviews to consumer behavior. They also develop from scratch a computerized technique that reliably determines the degree of narrativity of 190,461 verbatim, online consumer reviews and validate the automated text analysis with two controlled experiments. More transporting (i.e., engaging) and persuasive reviews have betterdeveloped characters and events as well as more emotionally changing genres and dramatic event orders. This interdisciplinary, multimethod research should help future researchers (1) predict how narrativity affects consumers’ narrative transportation and persuasion, (2) measure the narrativity of large digital corpora of textual data, and (3) understand how this important linguistic feature varies along a continuum.

We investigate the relationship between a firm’s use of management responses and its online reputation. We focus on the hotel industry and present several findings. First, hotels are likely to start responding following a negative shock to their ratings. Second, hotels respond to positive, negative, and neutral reviews at roughly the same rate. Third, by exploiting variation in the rate with which hotels respond on different review platforms and variation in the likelihood with which consumers are exposed to management responses, we find a 0.12-star increase in ratings and a 12% increase in review volume for responding hotels. Interestingly, when hotels start responding, they receive fewer but longer negative reviews. To explain this finding, we argue that unsatisfied consumers become less likely to leave short indefensible reviews when hotels are likely to scrutinize them. Our results highlight an interesting trade-off for managers considering responding: fewer negative ratings at the cost of longer and more detailed negative feedback. Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2017.1043 .

Do new communication technologies, such as social media, alleviate the collective action problem? This paper provides evidence that penetration of VK, the dominant Russian online social network, led to more protest activity during a wave of protests in Russia in 2011. As a source of exogenous variation in network penetration, we use the information on the city of origin of the students who studied with the founder of VK, controlling for the city of origin of the students who studied at the same university several years earlier or later. We find that a 10% increase in VK penetration increased the probability of a protest by 4.6% and the number of protesters by 19%. Additional results suggest that social media induced protest activity by reducing the costs of coordination rather than by spreading information critical of the government. We observe that VK penetration increased pro-governmental support, with no evidence of increased polarization. We also find that cities with higher fractionalization of network users between VK and Facebook experienced fewer protests, and the effect of VK on protests exhibits threshold behavior.

In fields as diverse as technology entrepreneurship and the arts, crowds of interested stakeholders are increasingly responsible for deciding which innovations to fund, a privilege that was previously reserved for a few experts, such as venture capitalists and grant-making bodies. Little is known about the degree to which the crowd differs from experts in judging which ideas to fund, and, indeed, whether the crowd is even rational in making funding decisions. Drawing on a panel of national experts and comprehensive data from the largest crowdfunding site, we examine funding decisions for proposed theater projects, a category where expert and crowd preferences might be expected to differ greatly. We instead find significant agreement between the funding decisions of crowds and experts. Where crowds and experts disagree, it is far more likely to be a case where the crowd is willing to fund projects that experts may not. Examining the outcomes of these projects, we find no quantitative or qualitative differences between projects funded by the crowd alone and those that were selected by both the crowd and experts. Our findings suggest that crowdfunding can play an important role in complementing expert decisions, particularly in sectors where the crowds are end users, by allowing projects the option to receive multiple evaluations and thereby lowering the incidence of “false negatives.” This paper was accepted by Lee Fleming, entrepreneurship and innovation .

Large collections of time series often have aggregation constraints due to product or geographical groupings. The forecasts for the most disaggregated series are usually required to add-up exactly to the forecasts of the aggregated series, a constraint we refer to as \"coherence.\" Forecast reconciliation is the process of adjusting forecasts to make them coherent. The reconciliation algorithm proposed by Hyndman et al. ( 2011 ) is based on a generalized least squares estimator that requires an estimate of the covariance matrix of the coherency errors (i.e., the errors that arise due to incoherence). We show that this matrix is impossible to estimate in practice due to identifiability conditions. We propose a new forecast reconciliation approach that incorporates the information from a full covariance matrix of forecast errors in obtaining a set of coherent forecasts. Our approach minimizes the mean squared error of the coherent forecasts across the entire collection of time series under the assumption of unbiasedness. The minimization problem has a closed-form solution. We make this solution scalable by providing a computationally efficient representation. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method compared to alternative methods using a series of simulation designs which take into account various features of the collected time series. This is followed by an empirical application using Australian domestic tourism data. The results indicate that the proposed method works well with artificial and real data. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

In a context of global-scale inequalities and increased middle-class transnational mobility, this paper explores how the arrival of Western European and North American migrants in Barcelona drives a process of gentrification that coexists and overlaps with the development of tourism in the city. Research has focused increasingly on the role of visitors and Airbnb in driving gentrification. However, our aim is to add another layer to the complexity of neighbourhood change in tourist cities by considering the role of migrants from advanced economies as gentrifiers in these neighbourhoods. We combined socio-demographic analysis with in-depth interviews and, from this, we found that: (1) lifestyle opportunities, rather than work, explain why transnational migrants are attracted to Barcelona, resulting in privileged consumers of housing that then displace long-term residents; (2) migrants have become spatially concentrated in tourist enclaves and interact predominantly with other transnational mobile populations; (3) the result is that centrally located neighbourhoods are appropriated by foreigners – both visitors and migrants – who are better positioned in the unequal division of labour, causing locals to feel increasingly excluded from the place. We illustrate that tourism and transnational gentrification spatially coexist and, accordingly, we provide an analysis that integrates both processes to understand how neighbourhood change occurs in areas impacted by tourism. By doing so, the paper offers a fresh reading of how gentrification takes place in a Southern European destination and, furthermore, it provides new insights into the conceptualisation of tourism and lifestyle migration as drivers of gentrification. 在全球范围内不平等和中产阶级跨国流动增加的背景下，本文探讨了在巴塞罗那，西欧和北美移民的到来如何推动了一个与城市旅游业发展共存和重叠的绅士化进程。研究越来越关注游客和爱彼迎在推动绅士化方面的作用。然而，我们的目标是通过考察来自发达经济体的移民作为这些街区的绅士化推动者角色，为旅游城市的街区变化增加另一层复杂性。我们将社会人口分析与深入访谈相结合，从中我们发现：（1）生活方式的机会，而不是工作，解释了为什么跨国移民被吸引到巴塞罗那，导致住房的特权消费者，然后驱逐长期居民；（2）移民在空间上集中在旅游飞地，主要与其他跨国流动人口互动；（3）结果是位于中心的街区被外国人（包括游客和移民）占据，他们在不平等的劳动分工中处于更有利的地位，导致当地人越来越感到被排斥在这个地方之外。我们证明旅游业和跨国绅士化在空间上是共存的，因此，我们提供了一个综合这两个过程的分析，以了解在受旅游业影响的地区街区关系是如何发生变化的。藉此，本文对一个南欧旅游胜地的绅士化进行了全新的解读，此外，本文还对旅游业和生活方式迁移的概念化作为绅士化的驱动因素提供了新的见解。

Increased international tourism in large European cities has been a growing social and political issue over the last few years. As the number of urban tourists has rapidly grown, studies have often focused on its socio-spatial consequences, commonly referred to as touristification, and have linked this to gentrification. This connection makes sense within the framework of planetary gentrification theories because the social injustices it generates in cities have a global pattern. However, gentrification is a complex process that must be analytically differentiated from tourism strategies and their effects. Whereas gentrification means a lower income population replaced by one of a higher status, touristification consists of an increase in tourist activity that generally implies the loss of residents. Strategies to appropriate and marketise culture to sustain tourismled economies can also shape more attractive places for foreign wealthy newcomers, whose arrival has been theorised as transnational gentrification. Discussions on the relationship between gentrification, transnational gentrification and touristification are essential, especially regarding how they work in transforming an urban area’s social fabric, for which Seville, Spain’s fourth largest city with an economy specialised in cultural tourism, provides a starting point. The focus is set on the processes’ timelines and similar patterns, which are tested on three consecutive scales of analysis: the city, the historic district and the Alameda neighbourhood. Through the examination of these transformations, the article concludes that transnational gentrification and touristification are new urban strategies and practices to revalorise real estate and appropriate urban surplus in unique urban areas. 在过去的几年里，欧洲大城市国际旅游业的增长已经成为一个日益突出的社会和政治问题。随着城市游客数量的快速增长，研究往往集中于其社会空间后果（这通常被称为旅游者化，touristification），并将其与绅士化联系起来。这种联系在全球绅士化理论的框架内是有意义的，因为它在城市中产生的社会不公正是一种全球规律。然而，绅士化是一个复杂的过程，必须从分析上区别于旅游战略及其影响。绅士化意味着收入较低的人口被地位较高的人口所取代，而旅游业则包括旅游活动的增加，这通常意味着居民的流失。为维持旅游业主导的经济而采取适当的文化营销策略，也可以为外国富裕的新移民创造更有吸引力的地方，他们的到来被理论上称为跨国绅士化。关于绅士化、跨国绅士化和旅游者化之间关系的讨论至关重要，特别是关于它们如何改变城市地区的社会结构，在这方面，经济以文化旅游业为重点的西班牙第四大城市塞维利亚提供了一个研究的起点。我们的研究重点放在过程的时间表和类似规律上，这些规律在三个连续的分析尺度上进行测试：城市、历史地区和阿拉梅达（Alameda）街区。通过对这些转变的考察，本文得出结论，跨国绅士化和旅游者化是在独特的城市地区稳定房地产和适当的城市剩余的新的城市战略和做法。

We examine whether shared collective experiences help build a national identity, by looking at the impact of national football teams’ victories in sub-Saharan Africa. We find that individuals surveyed in the days after an important victory of their country’s national team are 37 percent less likely to identify primarily with their ethnic group, and 30 percent more likely to trust other ethnicities, than those interviewed just before. Crucially, national team achievements also reduce violence: countries that (barely) qualified to the Africa Cup of Nations experience less civil conflict (9 percent fewer episodes) in the following months than countries that (barely) did not.