The growth of social media and the sharing economy is generating abundant unstructured image and video data. Computer vision techniques can derive rich insights from unstructured data and can inform recommendations for increasing profits and consumer utility—if only the model outputs are...

We investigate the economic impact of images and lower-level image factors that influence property demand in Airbnb. Using Difference-in-Difference analyses on a 16-month Airbnb panel dataset spanning 7,711 properties, we find that units with verified photos (taken by Airbnb's photographers)...

In 2020, as the novel coronavirus spread globally, face masks were recommended in public settings to protect against and slow down the spread of the coronavirus. Why did people comply, or not, while shopping in 2020? Do these motivations relate to their shopping behaviors? Based on the recent...

Non-informational cues, such as facial expressions, can significantly influence judgments and interpersonal impressions. Past research has explored how smiling affects business outcomes in offline or in-store contexts, yet relatively little is known about how smiling influences consumer choice...

We study the effect of Airbnb’s smart-pricing algorithm on the racial disparity in the daily revenue earned by Airbnb hosts. Our empirical strategy exploits Airbnb’s introduction of the algorithm and its voluntary adoption by hosts as a quasi-natural experiment. Among those who adopted the...