19 Tactics to Solve the Chicken-or-Egg Problem and Grow Your Marketplace

Papers we love: Auctions and Bidding

Papers from the computer science community to read and discuss.

Constrain the marketplace

; Decide which side of the marketplace to concentrate on; Drive initial supply; Drive initial demand. A 4-parts series with dozen of interviews of people with direct experience building and scaling marketplaces

A Rake Too Far: Optimal Platform Pricing Strategy

A bit of vocabulary: “In a casino, the term rake refers to the commission that the house earns for operating a poker game. (…) While casinos use the term rake, a plethora of interesting word choices exist which all describe the same thing – keeping a little bit of the revenue for the company that is running the service.”

Customized Regression Model for Airbnb Dynamic Pricing

This paper describes the pricing strategy model deployed at Airbnb