Managing value dimensions within an ecosystem framework: reflections and empirical observations in the tourism sector

The increasing attention in the field of value management is highlighting multiple challenges for researchers and practitioners. Building on previous managerial contributions, the paper aims to define a possible path for combining the conceptual contributions related to value in exchange, value in use, and value in context in a common framework to improve understanding of emerging social and economic dynamics under the interpretative lens provided by studies on ecosystems. Based on previous managerial contributions in the tourism management domain, the study identifies a set of variables related to the three conceptualizations of value with reference to the case of Airbnb. These variables are the host’s price per night (€), host position in the Airbnb ranking, previous evaluations of the host, average number of a host’s guests, availability of the host’s photographs, total number of services provided by the host, physical accessibility of the host (travel distance from the airport), and number of languages spoken by the host. Combining qualitative and quantitative approaches, the impact of the identified variables and users’ evaluation is investigated via structural equation modeling.