Which is an argument that this is not truly gouging - there's just a demand surge and a supply crunch and the market responds the same way as if it was a business conference in town.

Another thing worth pointing out is that the market of available Airbnbs clears out from the cheaper units first. So it may look like prices are shooting up, but really it's just that all the normal priced ones are gone.

we don't need to know.

if airbnb raised the prices and the market isn't there, rental income will go down and vacancy rates will go up and airbnb will lower prices again.

if airbnb raised the prices and the market stayed strong, they'd raise the prices more.

the higher the prices go, the more people with extra space to rent out will take notice and clean up their garage, or go stay at grandma's or whatever, creating more housing out of thin air (actually, on the margin) helping alleviate the housing shortage.

the same pattern would happen if hosts raise the prices themselves. also, if all the cheap places get rented, the market will appear to have higher prices even if nothing has changed.

let markets figure out prices, period. that's what markets do, it's one of mankind's stellar achievments. It's why the west is successful and communism fails.

if airbnb has monopoly power and is manipulating prices, fix that problem any day of the week, don't use a massive fire that destroys housing as evidence of anything, it means nothing, that's normal market correction.

When the rate shoots up like this drivers will get a message, and plenty of them will get out of bed or stop whatever they're doing and get on the road. The platform will probably take a nice cut, but otherwise to meet demand they'd have to subsidise most of the difference. That would be some very expensive PR.

> The hard question is how do you find the balance?

Why is that a hard question? What balance are you looking to find?

People should not be allowed to sell except at the government-mandated price. Of course, a few million may starve, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make in order to serve the community.

Hopefully, we can make this Great Leap Forward in consumer rights, and prevent Late Stage Capitalism from having a Mask-Off Moment in AI slop enshittification. If you disagree, I'm begging you to read a book. Tell me you're enabling corporate interests to cause trauma without telling me you're enabling corporate interests to cause trauma.

Examples of how other industries in other domains found the price "balance" where prices can substantially increase in a very short time without the negative stories of "gouging" :

- bid/ask spreads in exchange markets and letting the exchange's algorithm constantly "match" up all the buyers' bid amounts that meet/exceed the sellers' ask amounts. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bid%E2%80%93ask_spread)

- auctions in ebay, Sotheby's/Christie's, Google Adwords ad network platform, etc

The common theme to the above is that the buyers know their own actions affect the price they pay. The potential buyers also know that other buyers actions also affect the prices they pay. This eliminates the whole "gouging" aspect. If the Citadel hedge fund sells NVIDIA stock for 2x the price it was just 3 months ago to a dentist or grandmother's IRA retirement account, nobody bothers to write that "the hedge fund price gouged the dentist". The price (too high? too low?) is whatever the price happens to be because everybody else affected the price.

The problem is that the pricing mechanisms of bids-&-asks and/or auctions are not the favored type of transactions for the masses. Most people prefer fixed prices. Attempts at bids/asks and auctions for mass consumers didn't do that well. Priceline's "name your own price" for airlines was overtaken by conventional airline pricing. Ebay started as an auction website but now 85% of its listings are fixed price. (Because ebay sellers want to compete with Amazon Marketplace which has fixed prices.)

So for AirBnB / Uber to avoid the price gouging negativity, the platforms would have to find a way to get a bid/ask mechanism into it so the buyers are self-aware that they caused the high price increases. (It seems harder to do since booking a room has different start/end dates so it's not as fungible as selling NVIDIA stock.) In any case, the potential guest offers a price to pay and the host can accept/reject it. The potential guest has to account for what other guests would be willing to pay. This shifts the "pricing gouging" away from the hosts because the buyer is the one that offered the price amount.

If there's a real high-demand and low-supply situation and the platform doesn't provide a bid/ask/auction mechanism, the informal marketplace will organically re-create more inefficient versions of it ... e.g. scalpers selling Taylor Swift concert tickets and "price gouging" the fans.

Supply's not increasing substantially in the near future to help regardless. Folks place far too much faith in market effects that history has demonstrated again and again only take effect in the long term.

You know what would actually guarantee an increase in supply? Government-funded public housing. But that would deflate property prices, which is far more reprehensible to americans than the institutions of poverty and homelessness. We are a disgusting and reprehensible people.

The tide will turn when the UN will recognize the US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Africa, French Colonial territories, British Colonial territories, etc as "occupied". While they're at it, maybe they can also declare the new colonizers of Europe as occupiers too.