One vs Many: Causal Analysis of Airbnb using a Quasi-Experiment

Project part of Summer Internship 2020 at IIM Ahmedabad.

Duration: April 2020 - July 2020

Mentor: Prof. Anuj Kapoor, IIM Ahemdabad

Details:

• Compared the service quality ratings of hosts who own multiple properties to those who own only a single property, using detailed property-level data from Airbnb from the cities of Amsterdam & Antwerp
• Employed a Difference-in-Differences Design to causally study the effect of government crackdown on hosts who own multiple properties and disentangle the effect on service quality rating of hosts
• Used Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to classify 15k guest reviews into Property based & Host based and hence established a shift from Property to Host based reviews after the crackdown
• Investigated heterogeneity in effects using data driven machine learning algorithm: Causal Forest
• Paper Revised and Re-submitted to Elsevier’s IJRM.