Reputation Premium or Discount? Stochastic Prominence and Superhost Pricing on Airbnb
Professor Joosung Lee
Associate Professor
College of Economics
Sungkyunkwan University
Reputation badges are widely used in digital marketplaces. To investigate their impact on pricing, we develop a consumer search model with stochastic prominence. Under supermartingale exposure algorithms, which front-load badged sellers in search rankings, we show that badged sellers strategically lower their prices to discourage consumers from continued search. Non-badged sellers, by contrast, face less elastic demand and therefore optimally set higher prices. Empirically confirming the algorithm’s supermartingale property, we test this discount effect for Airbnb’s “Superhost” badge using a regression discontinuity design that exploits the strict host-rating threshold of 4.8. We find that obtaining the Superhost badge reduces listing prices by 16.5 percent, while losing the badge raises them by 15.5 percent.














