The primary platform service provided by Airbnb, though, is not to build a pretty web page showing off a property, to schedule rentals, or to take payments. Anyone with a modicum of web experience can do all those things in an afternoon. The essential job of an Internet service like Airbnb is to build what Alvin E. Roth, the economist whose work on labor marketplaces earned him the Nobel Prize, calls a “thick marketplace,” a critical mass of consumers and producers, readers and writers, or buyers and sellers.
