Cleanin’ it up: unshrouding hidden fees on a peer-to-peer platform

About the seminar topic

Dr Kevin Tran will be discussing his latest paper, Cleanin’ It Up: Unshrouding Hidden Fees on a Peer-to-Peer Platform (2026), co-authored with Leonardo Madio, Michelangelo Rossi and Mark J Tremblay.

Price-transparency mandates are usually motivated by a demand-side logic: when consumers underweight hidden fees, making total prices salient should reduce fee shrouding. We show that, when pricing authority is delegated to heterogeneous sellers, transparency also operates as a supply-side information shock: price displays inform sellers about their competitors, not only buyers about products. Under fee shrouding, sellers who use hidden add-ons display lower base prices, so an inattentive seller who benchmarks against displayed prices underestimates the true cost of competing listings. Revealing fee-inclusive prices corrects this misperception and can lead such sellers to raise posted prices.

Using Airbnb’s 2019 introduction of fee-inclusive price displays for EU users, we test this mechanism. Zero-fee listings, whose relative affordability improves most when competitors’ fees become visible, raise base prices by about £17 per night (or 17%). The effect is absent in New York City, where the display did not change, concentrated among non-superhosts and unaccompanied by any differential increase in bookings for these listings.

By contrast, fee-charging hosts more exposed to EU travellers modestly reduce cleaning fees by £0.50-0.55 in response to a salience shock affecting only guests searching from within the EU. Therefore, fee transparency in decentralised markets can reduce fees of some products while increasing prices of others.

Speaker bio

Dr Kevin Ducbao Tran is a Lecturer in economics at the School of Economics, University of Bristol, where his research focuses on digital economics, industrial organisation and behavioural aspects of online markets. His work examines the impact of digital platforms such as Airbnb on housing markets, competition and consumer welfare, and he has been published in leading outlets. He holds a PhD in economics from the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin) jointly with Technische Universität Berlin and the Berlin School of Economics, as well as Master of Science and Bachelor of Science degrees from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Register

No registration required. If you have any questions about this seminar, please email Emily Brown.

Light refreshments will be available in the Cambridge Judge Business School main foyer ahead of the seminar at 14:00.