Homeowners Use Airbnb to Dodge Foreclosure
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
To me, this seems fine when rare. So let's say I rent out a room once a month or something along those lines - no big deal. If I'm treating it like a real b-n-b, though, it seems like I'm engaged in some real commerce that is probably regulated. Presumably Airbnb behaves agnostically on this issue, allowing the responsibility to fall to the property owner?
I'm delighted for the specific homeowners being discussed here, but concerned about the general case.
Never assume the politicians ever do anything for you, except when it benefit themselfs.
Incidentally airbnb have great PR
If your concern is zoning, that's a reasonable concern if people were turning residential properties effectively in hotels. That criteria can be left to local lawmakers. However it seems in most cases people are simply using small-scale property they live in and previously would rent.
Anyway, if airbnb is smart they should try to stop people from abusing their system by trying to set up pseudo-hotels, since it's these people who are going to bring down the regulatory hammer on the entire system.
http://ny.curbed.com/tags/hotel-toshi
Sorry for the rant, but this is industry after industry, entrepreneurs like AirBNB try to create efficiency and wealth and the establishment comes along and buys off politicians to eliminate the competition.
Democrats hate corporations, Republicans hate the government. Or maybe they just pit us against each other while they all laugh their way to the bank.
Once a problem occurs, and gets enough media coverage to drive regulation, it has also achieved enough awareness to become a point of marketing/competition/consumer-activism. That might be enough to control the risk, even without official state inspectors/licensors/bureaucrats. Especially in the modern era of costless sharing/archiving/finding of customer reviews and discussion.
Why not have voluntary associations that people can join but have rules on business? If the organization have honest inspectors, their reputation will show. Businesses will pay for that kind of exclusive brands. Risk-averse customers will flock to it.
If you have an organization that everyone must join by law to practice certain field, then it could be a breeding ground for corruptions. The government is now intertwined with a professional organization, and then create an illusion of safety which none shouldn't exists.
Associations that has been around for years will have more trusts than new associations that pop up. The new associations will then prove that they're not kooks that been rejected by incumbent associations.
Government is susceptible to lobbying by interested parties (thinking about hoteliers vs Airbnb). Professional organizations are susceptible to antitrust (thinking about Wilk vs AMA) and perhaps to perpetuating the problem they are designed to solve.
I think I can spot if a hotel room is clean or not. I doubt I could tell if the bedsheets had been properly sterilized, or if the shower was cleaned with bleach, but I can carry a sleeping bag and a pair of rubber slippers.
Neighbors will complain about tourists partying till 3am every night, but that could be handled by the cops. They could raise some revenue by fining noise polluters, just like they fine people who break the speed limit.
Yes. Almost every "trade" has one.
Every regulated one does. More to the point, every newly regulated trade had one that helped write the rules that they pushed through the relevant govt body.
No idea. However, we're discussing whether regulated trades have trade associations and whether those associations are involved in the regulations. No one implied that every trade was regulated, or even that every trade with a trade association was regulated.
Yes I meant what you said - hairdressers, etc. My bad. Need more coffee in the morning.
This is an illusion. Are you going to check with what association your taxi driver is registered and have you done the necessary research upfront to judge the credentials of the association? If a taxi stops and it's from the 'wrong' association, but you know it's relatively cheap, are you going to send it away and wait for the next one?
Especially services that an individual uses only very infrequently, such as a taxi, can get away with very poor performance. The businessman will tell everyone that the taxis in StateCapital suck, but a few months later, when he's there again for a one-off trip, he will have forgotten the name of the taxi service that rendered him such a bad service last time. However, commerce in StateCapital is harmed by all the gossipy remarks concerning one of their taxi services (which are remembered as concerning all taxi services in the city). Requiring taxi drivers to be licensed and checked on by the government could very well be a net advantage for all commerce in StateCapital.
UL is private company that sets safety standards and tests products that manufacturers voluntarily submit for (and pay for) testing.
Does a small mid-west town have the resources and and expertise to inspect the traveling carnival rides to insure they are set-up properly? Or does the carnival's insurance carrier handle that responsibility?
There are private replacements for coercive regulation that are not theoretical but are actually working.
UL is private company that sets safety standards and tests products that
manufacturers voluntarily submit for (and pay for) testing.
Another explanation is that large brand A initially wanted to distinguish itself as 'the safest' and brand B just followed the lead so it didn't seem less safe. When they control a substantial part of the market, others will soon follow. After that, the actual contents behind the logo don't matter anymore. It's a perception-driven protection racket, the actual value of which cannot be determined by consumers. But it doesn't even matter how it comes about: after most of a market sports a certain logo or association, what's to stop that organisation from growing lax and pleasing their clients? There is hardly any room for competition in that market: who's going to start a UL competitor and why on earth would a brand be interested?
Or, the more fundamental question: who tests the testers? How do you know the UL is not theoretical and actually working? Even the government suffers from corruption; I doubt such companies are any better.
This is a valid point, because people don't always have the time to do detailed research when they make buying decisions. However, with the internet, and with (soon) most people carrying smartphones, this may change. One could easily imagine a registration including a computer-readable logo, that when one points one's phone at it, produces reviews of whether that registration is good or bad.
> The businessman will tell everyone that the taxis in StateCapital suck, but a few months later, when he's there again for a one-off trip, he will have forgotten the name of the taxi service that rendered him such a bad service last time. However, commerce in StateCapital is harmed by all the gossipy remarks concerning one of their taxi services (which are remembered as concerning all taxi services in the city).
Then why not have the city government issue a voluntary registration? Then, if people value it and feel it provides real benefits against being ripped off, they will value that registration.
But compulsory government licenses are if anything more likely to lead to customers being ripped off than protecting those costomers. Consider New York, where a taxi medallion costs $600,000 (source: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN3040666220070530 ). Who pays the $600k? Eventually the customers do.
So compulsory government licensing is more likely to lead to me being ripped off than no licensing.
One could easily imagine a registration including a
computer-readable logo, that when one points one's phone at
it, produces reviews of whether that registration is good
or bad.
You might have better luck than me. Every month or so I try to solve it and so far each solution runs into one or more of: privacy, chicken-or-egg, incentives-to-use, internet-dickwad, or some kind of abuse from the various players.
Pretending you've got a registration when you haven't is equally possible whether the registration is compulsory or not, so making registrations optional would not cause that problem.
Gaming the system by trying to get people to believe your product/service/company is better than it actually is, is as old as commerce, and societies have developed ways of coping with this which while not perfect, do work well enough that the vast majority of economic actors see it as not in their interest to rip people off.
You'll never get a perfect solution, but what is achievable is one that works reasonably well.
I'm not sure that this is true any more. I remember that it used to be possible to find bad—or even just informative—reviews of products; but now it seems to me that there's a ‘conspiracy’ (in an informal sense, not an actual plotting-together sense) between
• providers who have no scruples about packing reviews with spurious praise,
and
• review-collectors who are either
•• less powerful than the providers (in which case they will winnow the reviews to just the good ones to curry favour) or
•• more powerful than the providers (in which case, because power corrupts, they will informally censor reviews for the providers who provide them bribes).
(Trying to find reviews of apartments, as I was doing recently, really drives this point home. Almost no-one reviews his or her apartment unless he or she is really unhappy, and, since it's so easy to do and there's effectively no penalty for it, it's more or less a given that the top reviews for each complex will be posted by staff of that complex.)
Death to lobbyists.
Florists probably argued the same thing that most professions that try to round the circle of the guild argue: the profession required special knowledge and for the sake of consumer protection we need to let only vetted people into the group. It's the same argument doctors use - yet I hardly ever meet anyone who questions the need for certification by a professional group or government of the medical profession (for the record I oppose such barriers to entry and advocate putting more responsibility with the consumer).
Of course I choose the florist and the doctor because they're two ends on the spectrum, but where do you draw the line?
Case in point: jacuzzi salesman. Doesn't sound like much of a problem, does it? Couple of years ago there was a show or trade fair of some sort around here where a jacuzzi salesman failed to disinfect the water in his sample jacuzzi. Salmonella developed in it, people walked by (thousands of them) and 10 or so died. Could this have been prevented with a licensing mechanism for jacuzzi salesmen? Probably. Is jacuzzi salesman a bigger health risk than florists? I don't know. Once a florist screws up and sells a flower with a fungus on it or whatever that they could've recognized, there will be calls for 'professional standards' and what not.
Because of this slippery slope, I oppose all forms of registration. But yeah that probably means that there'll be some quacks who call themselves medical professionals. It'll be up to the patient to check if a hospital employs doctors who didn't go to medical school, or the mortality stats of a certain hospital. Let organizations like Consumer Reports find out who are trust-worthy and who aren't. I don't consider that a government job, let alone a job that we can reasonably expect the profession to self-regulate.
"Every decision an interior designer makes in one way or another affects the health, safety and welfare of the public. Those decisions include specifying furniture, fabrics and carpeting that comply with fire codes and space planning that provides proper means of egress. Additionally, interior designers deal with accessibility issues, ergonomics, lighting, acoustics and design solutions for those with special needs."
His prognosis for the general situation doesn't look good: "My colleagues tell me that it would just seem silly to make a fuss over this; it is just not a serious topic. Yes we can't take seriously the idea of legally requiring a college degree to suggest where pillows go, but we also can't take seriously an economist who would focus on such a trivial and obvious point. [...] But if we cannot actually apply that knowledge effectively to obvious cases, what is the point exactly?"
http://robinhanson.typepad.com/overcomingbias/2009/04/silly-...
http://ny.curbed.com/tags/hotel-toshi
But in reality what these enterprising homeowners are doing is real capitalism.
So politicians are protecting the former (corporations) and destroying the latter
- they are actually working against capitalism!