Collaborative Housing and the Intermediation of Moral Hazard
This paper considers intermediation in a differentiated short-term housing market where heterogeneous agents may stay at a hotel or at one of several private hosts' properties, below or above hotel quality. The collaborative-housing market fails when agents' hidden actions are noncontractable. If expected liability is not excessive, a trusted intermediary can induce agents to exert first-best effort and fully insure the hosts' risks, without subsidizing the transactions. The intermediary can also extract the hosts' surplus if their outside option is zero; somewhat counterintuitively, the commission on either side of the transactions does not affect agents' equilibrium payoffs. The optimal commission structure makes direct transactions between hosts and renters unattractive.
2014
New York
978-1-4799-2504-9
9
Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
4133
4141
REVIEWED
EPFL
Event name | Event place | Event date |
Waikoloa, HI | JAN 06-09, 2014 | |