Tag: airbnb

Politically Conservative Airbnb Hosts, Uber Drivers And Waiters Get Slightly Higher Ratings And Tips
BUSINESS, IN OTHER NEWS

Politically Conservative Airbnb Hosts, Uber Drivers And Waiters Get Slightly Higher Ratings And Tips

BUSINESS   The big idea Customers give higher ratings and tips to politically conservative Airbnb hosts, Uber drivers and waiters than to ones with more liberal leanings, according to new peer-reviewed research I co-authored. That’s despite evidence we found that consumers may actually expect the opposite. To reach the first conclusion, a colleague and I conducted four different studies. The first involved poring over about 50,000 Airbnb listings in 16 U.S. cities. We examined average ratings and compared them with the percentage of Republican voters in the city, based on recent elections. We found that Airbnb hosts in cities with a greater share of Republican voters tended to have higher ratings. Specifically, an increase of one percentage point in a city’s proportion of Republican...
To Disguise Their Corporate Lobbying As Grassroots Campaigns Airbnb And Uber Use Activist Tactics
IN OTHER NEWS

To Disguise Their Corporate Lobbying As Grassroots Campaigns Airbnb And Uber Use Activist Tactics

What David Cameron once called “the far-too-cosy relationship between politics, government, business and money”, has come back to haunt him. By lobbying on behalf of Lex Greensill’s influential finance company, the former UK prime minister’s prediction that lobbying would be “the next big scandal” has been proven right. With Prime Minister Boris Johnson calling an inquiry into the episode, it all raises questions about the lobbying laws the Cameron government introduced in 2014. They appear so weak that seemingly no elements of the current saga were illegal. Exemptions in the rules that prevent in-house lobbyists like Cameron from having to appear on the statutory register have left up to 80% of corporate lobbying untouched. Yet this is not the only aspect of corporate lobbying that sho...