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How are Uber, AirBnB, UpWork, and Stripe rent-seeking business models?

• chii 8y ago
  Rent seeking is the wrong term for those businesses. A more appropriate term might be a market maker. Rent seeking specifically means to extract extra money from an existing asset, but not produce any extra value (but purely by virtue of owning the asset).
  • fergie 8y ago
    What you say is true in the purest sense. Building on this, some economists regard monopolies of exchange as "assets". Baumol (the economist referenced in the article) did a lot of research into "Contestble Markets Theory", essentially concluding that markets which are not contestable generate free money for incumbants/owners/monopolists You could say that anything to do with the "Sharing" or "Gig" economy is a play on rent extraction. Companies seek to own a marketplace in order to levy a rent on transactions.
• grigjd3 8y ago
  They seek to change or undermine regulations in order to provide for their middleman positions.