My Journey to Airbnb: Peter Coles (opens in new tab)

Peter Coles’s career connects mathematical training, academic economics, and practical data science. After studying game theory and market design, he moved from Harvard Business School to eBay and then Airbnb, where he could apply economic models to real-world marketplaces. At Airbnb, he helped build economics and data science teams, guide policy decisions, investigate pandemic-driven changes, and measure the company’s broader impact.

From Mathematics to Economics

• Coles grew up in Milwaukee and developed an early interest in marketplaces by trying to run a neighborhood rock stand.
• He studied math at Princeton after briefly pursuing ancient history.
• He earned a PhD in economics at Stanford, focusing on game theory—the study of strategic decision-making.
• His mentor, Jon Levin, taught him to simplify complex research problems.
• While studying in Germany, Coles traveled around Europe and stayed with strangers connected to classmates, unintentionally experimenting with a model similar to Airbnb.

Studying Markets and Market Design

• At Harvard Business School, Coles researched market design and taught with Al Roth, who later won the Nobel Prize in Economics.
• His work focused on “matching,” or designing systems that pair participants from two groups when prices cannot directly balance supply and demand.
• He studied participant strategy, signaling, and market mechanisms, including improvements to the market for PhD economists.
• He also wrote business cases about companies such as Zillow, Microsoft, and Craigslist.
• Although he valued academia, he found the long research and peer-review cycle was not a good long-term fit.

Applying Economics at eBay

• In 2013, Coles joined eBay as technology and the sharing economy were rapidly expanding.
• He led an economics team created by Steve Tadelis and helped combine it with another group to form eBay’s Data Labs.
• One notable project, “What’s It Worth,” developed a method for estimating the fair market value of items sold on eBay.
• The work combined economic reasoning, practical marketplace knowledge, and statistical modeling.

Building Airbnb’s Economics and Data Science Functions

• In 2015, Coles joined Airbnb to help address the company’s growing regulatory challenges.
• He built a global team of economists and data scientists to study short-term rentals and their relationship with cities.
• The team used data to inform policy discussions and evaluate Airbnb’s effects on guests, hosts, and communities.
• This role allowed Coles to connect economic theory with decisions affecting a rapidly expanding platform.

Central Strategy & Insights

• As Airbnb grew, executives needed analysis that crossed organizational boundaries.
• Coles and Jackson Wang founded Central Strategy & Insights, known as CSI.
• The team acted as “forensic investigators,” assembling evidence and narratives from company-wide data.
• During the pandemic, CSI analyzed major changes in guest travel patterns and determined what kinds of supply Airbnb would need.
• The team also led business reviews and prepared analyses for shareholders before Airbnb’s IPO.

Measuring Airbnb’s Broader Impact

• Coles later returned to policy-focused work with a larger economics organization.
• The team developed models to guide Airbnb’s response to governments as travel recovered after the pandemic.
• Economists and analysts evaluated Airbnb’s impact on hosts, guests, and society.
• Their work included the US Economic Impact Report and expanded collaboration with academic researchers using Airbnb data.

Coles’s experience suggests that marketplace companies benefit from combining rigorous economic research with hands-on data science. Moving between academia and industry enabled him to turn theories about market design into practical tools for product strategy, policy, and impact measurement.