For the past year, the City of Copenhagen has been faced with various questions about the negative impacts of AirBnB on housing stock, housing price and business opportunities for hotels in the city. Up until now the municipality has assumed that any potential problems, related to the exponential growth of AirBnB listings in Copenhagen, are relatively small in volume – whereas the potential positive impacts of a greater number of tourists experiencing the city in new ways is currently

assumed to outweigh the negative effects. However, as the municipality tries to navigate in the sharing economy, the need to understand what is exactly the impact of the new platforms, such as the Airbnb, rises.

 

The sharing economy has become a prominent, though not well understood economic phenomenon, over the past several years (Lane & Woodworth, 2016). In this project, we focus on the impacts that the sharing economy platform – Airbnb – can have on the housing and tourism markets in Copenhagen, a provider of travel accommodation and a pioneer of the sharing economy (Lane & Woodworth, 2016; Zervas, Proserpio, & Byers, 2016). With Airbnb having served over 60 million

guests worldwide since it was founded in 2008 (Airbnb, 2016a) we assume that Airbnb can have a measurable and quantifiable impact on the housing and tourism markets in Copenhagen.