Airbnb: An Analysis of Consumer Surplus

Capstone Project for New York University's Stern School of Business (MBA): Data Science for Business Analytics

Directory Structure

Code contains code used in this project

Images contains images and statistical graphs produced

Paper contains the final write up with methods and results used for this project

Presentation contains the PDF presentation file

Introduction

Can we measure Airbnb as an innovation?

Welfare (Consumer Surplus) is a measure of additional benefit consumer receive because they’re paying less for something than what they are willing to pay

Purpose: Show regulators in $ amount how much welfare AirBnB generates in NYC market. 'Welfare' is also known as consumer surplus which is the measure of the additional benefit that consumers receive because they're paying less for something than what they were willing to pay.

The Consumer Surplus Diagram More about Consumer Surplus

Three Critical Variables

1. Price: consumers pay for the rental

2. Quantity Demanded: Aggregated of all listings

3. Willingness to Pay: for each consumer

Seasonality

Feature Selection

K-Modes Clustering