73,992 research outputs found
Sharing Means Renting?: An Entire-marketplace Analysis of Airbnb
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.Comment: WebSci '1
Quantifying the effects of social influence
How do humans respond to indirect social influence when making decisions? We
analysed an experiment where subjects had to repeatedly guess the correct
answer to factual questions, while having only aggregated information about the
answers of others. While the response of humans to aggregated information is a
widely observed phenomenon, it has not been investigated quantitatively, in a
controlled setting. We found that the adjustment of individual guesses depends
linearly on the distance to the mean of all guesses. This is a remarkable, and
yet surprisingly simple, statistical regularity. It holds across all questions
analysed, even though the correct answers differ in several orders of
magnitude. Our finding supports the assumption that individual diversity does
not affect the response to indirect social influence. It also complements
previous results on the nonlinear response in information-rich scenarios. We
argue that the nature of the response to social influence crucially changes
with the level of information aggregation. This insight contributes to the
empirical foundation of models for collective decisions under social influence.Comment: 3 figure
Mechanically bonded macromolecules
Mechanically bonded macromolecules constitute a class of challenging synthetic targets in polymer science. The controllable intramolecular motions of mechanical bonds, in combination with the processability and useful physical and mechanical properties of macromolecules, ultimately ensure their potential for applications in materials science, nanotechnology and medicine. This tutorial review describes the syntheses and properties of a library of diverse mechanically bonded macromolecules, which covers (i) main-chain, side-chain, bridged, and pendant oligo/polycatenanes, (ii) main-chain oligo/polyrotaxanes, (iii) poly[c2]daisy chains, and finally (iv) mechanically interlocked dendrimers. A variety of highly efficient synthetic protocols—including template-directed assembly, step-growth polymerisation, quantitative conjugation, etc.—were employed in the construction of these mechanically interlocked architectures. Some of these structures, i.e., side-chain polycatenanes and poly[c2]daisy chains, undergo controllable molecular switching in a manner similar to their small molecular counterparts. The challenges posed by the syntheses of polycatenanes and polyrotaxanes with high molecular weights are contemplated
New Economic Analysis of Law: Beyond Technocracy and Market Design
This special issue on New Economic Analysis of Law features illuminating syntheses of social science and law. What would law and economics look like if macroeconomics were a concern of scholars now focused entirely on microeconomics? Do emerging online phenomena, such as algorithmic pricing and platform capitalism, promise to perfect economic theories of market equilibrium, or challenge their foundations? How did simplified economic models gain ideological power in policy circles, and how can they be improved or replaced? This issue highlights scholars whose work has made the legal academy more than an “importer” of ideas from other disciplines—and who have, instead, shown that rigorous legal analysis is fundamental to understanding economic affairs.The essays in this issue should help ensure that policymakers’ turn to new economic thinking promotes inclusive prosperity. Listokin, Bayern, and Kwak have identified major aporias in popular applications of law and economics methods. Ranchordás, Stucke, and Ezrachi have demonstrated that technological fixes, ranging from digital ranking and rating systems to artificial intelligence-driven personal assistants, are unlikely to improve matters unless they are wisely regulated. McCluskey and Rahman offer a blueprint for democratic regulation, which shapes the economy in productive ways and alleviates structural inequalities. Taken as a whole, this issue of Critical Analysis of Law shows that legal thinkers are not merely importers of ideas and models from economics, but also active participants, with a great deal to contribute to social science research
Why compensating fibre nonlinearity will never meet capacity demands
Current research efforts are focussed on overcoming the apparent limits of
communication in single mode optical fibre resulting from distortion due to
fibre nonlinearity. It has been experimentally demonstrated that this Kerr
nonlinearity limit is not a fundamental limit; thus it is pertinent to review
where the fundamental limits of optical communications lie, and direct future
research on this basis. This paper details recently presented results. The work
herein briefly reviews the intrinsic limits of optical communication over
standard single mode optical fibre (SMF), and shows that the empirical limits
of silica fibre power handling and transceiver design both introduce a
practical upper bound to the capacity of communication using SMF, on the order
of 1 Pbit/s. Transmission rates exceeding 1 Pbit/s are shown to be possible,
however, with currently available optical fibres, attempts to transmit beyond
this rate by simply increasing optical power will lead to an asymptotically
zero fractional increase in capacity.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure
- …