Disintermediation and Its Mitigation in Online Two-sided Platforms: Evidence from Airbnb

Disintermediation, where providers and customers transact bypassing an intermediary, has challenged the business model and dwindled profits of the multi-billion-dollar platform economy. Despite the platforms’ efforts to mitigate disintermediation, little is known regarding the extent of disintermediation or efficacy of the mitigation policies, largely due to unobservability of disintermediation. We tackle these challenges by designing a geo-analytic methodology to identify and quantify disintermediation by matching online Airbnb booking and offline granular mobile location data. We further leverage DiD with matching samples to causally examine the efficacy of four Airbnb policies; and finally propose a cost-and-benefit conceptual framework to interpret the findings and guide platform designs of mitigation policies. We find, for instance, a 5.4% of disintermediation in Austin, TX over Summer 2019; and Instant Bookable reduces disintermediation by 9%, with a stronger effect among the hosts without preference for long-term lease, with more repeated guests, and more hosting experience

Housing and interest rates: a weaker link?

Housing ; Interest rates ; Disintermediation ; Business cycles

Regulating Shadows: Financial Regulation and Responsibility Failure

In the modern financial architecture, financial services and products increasingly are provided outside of the traditional banking system—and thus without the need for bank intermediation between capital markets and the users of funds. Most corporate financing, for example, no longer is dependent on bank loans but raised through special-purpose entities, money-market mutual funds, securities lenders, hedge funds, and investment banks. This shift, referred to as “disintermediation” and described as creating a “shadow banking” system, is so radically transforming finance that regulatory scholars need to rethink their assumptions. Two of the fundamental market failures underlying shadow banking—information failure and agency failure—were also prevalent in the bank-intermediated financial system. By amplifying systemic risk, however, disintermediation greatly increases the importance of what scholars long have viewed as a third market-failure category: externalities. Viewing externalities as a distinct category of market failure is misleading, though: externalities are fundamentally consequences, not causes, of failures; and all market failures can result in externalities. Focusing on externalities also obscures who should be responsible for causing the externalities. This article argues that the third market-failure category should be reconceptualized as a “responsibility failure”: a firm’s ability to externalize a significant portion of the costs of taking a risky action. That not only would more precisely describe the market failure but also would help to illuminate that sometimes the government itself, not merely individual firms, should bear responsibility for causing externalities, and that exercising this responsibility may require the government to enact laws that require firms to internalize those costs

Credibility of Health Information and Digital Media: New Perspectives and Implications for Youth

Part of the Volume on Digital Media, Youth, and Credibility. This chapter considers the role of Web technologies on the availability and consumption of health information. It argues that young people are largely unfamiliar with trusted health sources online, making credibility particularly germane when considering this type of information. The author suggests that networked digital media allow for humans and technologies act as "apomediaries" that can be used to steer consumers to high quality health information, thereby empowering health information seekers of all ages

Lawyers in the Shadows: The Transactional Lawyer in a World of Shadow Banking

This article examines how the role of transactional lawyers should change in the new world of shadow banking. Although transactional lawyers should consider the potential systemic consequences of their client\u27s actions, their actions should be tempered by their primary duties to the client and by their responsibilities to the l,egal system more broadly

Disintermediation and the role of banks in Europe : an international comparison ; paper prepared for the Symposium on "The Design of Financial Systems and Markets" at the University of Amsterdam, June 1998

The paper presents an empirical analysis of the alledged transformation of the financial systems in the three major European economies, France, Germany and the UK. Based on a unified data set developed on the basis of national accounts statistics, and employing a new and consistent method of measurement, the following questions are addressed: Is there a common pattern of structural change; do banks lose importance in the process of change; and are the three financial systems becoming more similar? We find that there is neither a general trend towards disintermediation, nor towards a transformation from bank-based to capital market-based financial systems, nor for a loss of importance of banks. Only in the case of France strong signs of transformation as well as signs of a general decline in the role of banks could be found. Thus the three financial systems also do not seem to become more similar. However, there is also a common pattern of change: the intermediation chains are lengthening in all three countries. Nonbank financial intermediaries are taking over a more important role as mobilizers of capital from the non-financial sectors. In combination with the trend towards securitization of bank liabilites, this change increases the funding costs of banks and may put banks under pressure. In the case of France, this change is so pronounced that it might even threaten the stability of the financial system

Remixing Cinema: The case of the Brighton Swarm of Angels

Disintermediation, web 2.0, distributed problem solving, collaborative creation/art, user-centred innovation, creative common