Price-Setting Behavior in a Tourism Sharing Economy Accommodation Market: A Hedonic Price Analysis of AirBnB Hosts in the Caribbean

This study investigated the price-setting behaviour of hosts in the tourism sharing economy in the Caribbean. Generally speaking, we find that site, reputation, convenience, personal and amenities attributes, along with country-level indicators significantly affect prices in the Caribbean. More specifically, most attributes have a positive effect on price-setting. Larger accommodations charge higher prices. Hosts with superior reputations charge higher prices. However, listings with a larger number of ratings are associated with lower prices. This may be an artefact of tourists’ preferences for cheaper sharing accommodations, resulting in a relatively higher volume of reviews for properties at the lower end of the price spectrum. Provision of Convenience options have an overall positive effect on prices, although there is evidence that some options can result in lower prices for tourists. The sole Personal attribute investigated is associated with higher price-setting behaviour. Virtually all amenities examined result in greater prices being charged for the space. Results indicate that geography has significant effects on price-setting behaviour. Listings in countries with greater economic and infrastructural development, greater biodiversity, but weaker exchange rates have higher prices. On the other hand, prices are lower in countries where there is more competition for customers

Price-Setting Behavior in a Tourism Sharing Economy Accommodation Market: A Hedonic Price Analysis of AirBnB Hosts in the Caribbean

This study investigated the price-setting behaviour of hosts in the tourism sharing economy in the Caribbean. Generally speaking, we find that site, reputation, convenience, personal and amenities attributes, along with country-level indicators significantly affect prices in the Caribbean. More specifically, most attributes have a positive effect on price-setting. Larger accommodations charge higher prices. Hosts with superior reputations charge higher prices. However, listings with a larger number of ratings are associated with lower prices. This may be an artefact of tourists’ preferences for cheaper sharing accommodations, resulting in a relatively higher volume of reviews for properties at the lower end of the price spectrum. Provision of Convenience options have an overall positive effect on prices, although there is evidence that some options can result in lower prices for tourists. The sole Personal attribute investigated is associated with higher price-setting behaviour. Virtually all amenities examined result in greater prices being charged for the space. Results indicate that geography has significant effects on price-setting behaviour. Listings in countries with greater economic and infrastructural development, greater biodiversity, but weaker exchange rates have higher prices. On the other hand, prices are lower in countries where there is more competition for customers

Coronal Heating as Determined by the Solar Flare Frequency Distribution Obtained by Aggregating Case Studies

Flare frequency distributions represent a key approach to addressing one of the largest problems in solar and stellar physics: determining the mechanism that counter-intuitively heats coronae to temperatures that are orders of magnitude hotter than the corresponding photospheres. It is widely accepted that the magnetic field is responsible for the heating, but there are two competing mechanisms that could explain it: nanoflares or Alfv\'en waves. To date, neither can be directly observed. Nanoflares are, by definition, extremely small, but their aggregate energy release could represent a substantial heating mechanism, presuming they are sufficiently abundant. One way to test this presumption is via the flare frequency distribution, which describes how often flares of various energies occur. If the slope of the power law fitting the flare frequency distribution is above a critical threshold, $\alpha=2$ as established in prior literature, then there should be a sufficient abundance of nanoflares to explain coronal heating. We performed $>$600 case studies of solar flares, made possible by an unprecedented number of data analysts via three semesters of an undergraduate physics laboratory course. This allowed us to include two crucial, but nontrivial, analysis methods: pre-flare baseline subtraction and computation of the flare energy, which requires determining flare start and stop times. We aggregated the results of these analyses into a statistical study to determine that $\alpha = 1.63 \pm 0.03$. This is below the critical threshold, suggesting that Alfv\'en waves are an important driver of coronal heating.Comment: 1,002 authors, 14 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, published by The Astrophysical Journal on 2023-05-09, volume 948, page 7