How to react to a shock? Effects of Airbnb hosts’ choices and market segmentation at the time of Covid-19
研究了新冠疫情下Airbnb房东如何调整价格和取消政策等营销策略，发现组合策略能通过市场细分机制带来超比例绩效提升，对平台服务商和研究者有参考价值。
We investigate the way service providers who operate on an online peer-to-peer (P2P) platform readapted their marketing choices to face the Covid-19 pandemic. Through an empirical investigation on a large dataset of Airbnb properties in Rome, observed from January 2018 to December 2020, we provide a threefold contribution by investigating how Airbnb hosts reacted to the Covid-19 pandemic shock, in terms of marketing choices, such as price adjustments and flexible cancellation policies; the direct effects of these choices on their economic returns; and how service providers on Airbnb reacted to address the new needs of their customers during the Covid-19 pandemic. The findings provide useful insights for researchers and practitioners and show that the adoption of combined marketing choices led to more than proportional effects on performances as it allowed Airbnb hosts to exploit profitable market segmentation mechanisms.