| With the vigorous development of sharing economy,the platform of sharing economy continues to penetrate into our life.Accommodation-sharing platforms,such as Airbnb,create values by matching hosts and guests.The emergence of Instant Booking(IB)service has changed the matching mode and greatly improved the matching efficiency of the accommodation-sharing platforms but at the expense of matching quality.Taking this as the research background,this study combs the research related to sharing economy strategy,bilateral platform pricing strategy,bilateral platform matching strategy and instant booking strategy,looking for the lack of research and lays a theoretical foundation.The main research contents are as follows:This study develops a game-theoretical model to characterize two rival hosts’ decisions on turning on IB or not as well as their pricing decision.Several interesting findings are as follows.First,we find when at least one host turns on IB,the increase in the platform’s commission rate could reduce the price competition and may lead to increases in the host’s profit.Second,we uncover conditions under which the two rival hosts will use instant booking and find that the additional service cost resulting from using IB has a non-monotonous impact on the host’s IB decision.Then,this study compares the profits gained by the platform under four market configurations and analyzes how different factors influence the platform’s profit.The results show that when at least one host turns on IB,with a higher additional service cost,the platform’s profit will first increase and then decrease although the accommodation prices increase monotonously.Finally,all hosts turning on IB is not always the best market configuration for the platform.When the natural matching probability(without IB)is relatively high,all hosts using IB service will intensify the price competition on the platform,leading to a decrease in the average profit margin of each order.Finally,management implications are provided to help accommodation-sharing platforms guide hosts making matching decisions and maximize their profits. |
