# Sharing Means Renting?: An Entire-marketplace Analysis of Airbnb

## TL;DR

This large-scale study analyzes Airbnb's global marketplace, revealing it primarily functions as a rental platform with prevalent commercial hosts and positive review biases, providing empirical insights into its impact and characteristics.

## Contribution

First comprehensive measurement study of Airbnb using extensive data, highlighting its role as a rental marketplace and analyzing host types, review biases, and geographic coverage.

## Key findings

- Airbnb's listings are mostly entire homes, indicating a rental marketplace model.
- Positive review bias is stronger than in Yelp reviews.
- Commercial hosts are prevalent, early adopters, mainly in the US, with many listings.

## Abstract

Airbnb, an online marketplace for accommodations, has experienced a staggering growth accompanied by intense debates and scattered regulations around the world. Current discourses, however, are largely focused on opinions rather than empirical evidences. Here, we aim to bridge this gap by presenting the first large-scale measurement study on Airbnb, using a crawled data set containing 2.3 million listings, 1.3 million hosts, and 19.3 million reviews. We measure several key characteristics at the heart of the ongoing debate and the sharing economy. Among others, we find that Airbnb has reached a global yet heterogeneous coverage. The majority of its listings across many countries are entire homes, suggesting that Airbnb is actually more like a rental marketplace rather than a spare-room sharing platform. Analysis on star-ratings reveals that there is a bias toward positive ratings, amplified by a bias toward using positive words in reviews. The extent of such bias is greater than Yelp reviews, which were already shown to exhibit a positive bias. We investigate a key issue---commercial hosts who own multiple listings on Airbnb---repeatedly discussed in the current debate. We find that their existence is prevalent, they are early-movers towards joining Airbnb, and their listings are disproportionately entire homes and located in the US. Our work advances the current understanding of how Airbnb is being used and may serve as an independent and empirical reference to inform the debate.