"With restaurants, they can play around with price -- that is, have different menu prices at different demand levels," Professor Kimes said, and even speed up meal service for low-rent customers once the higher-paying prime-time customers arrive.
The aim, he said, will be to provide something end-to-end for both renting customers and those supplying properties, where information doesn't need to be entered repeatedly and works more efficiently.
They also keep one in a concrete shelter out back to rent to customers at $100 an hour.
Under the old policy, the company said it didn't sell, trade or rent its customers' personal information to other companies.
"We really are focused on owning and not renting our customers," said Suzi Levine, the Expedia.com product manager.
"If it's a toss-up whether to buy or to rent, the customer is buying," Mr. Peters said.
Netflix typically buys the film and TV show DVDs that it rents to customers through wholesale venues, thereby taking advantage of volume discounts.
My priority was to elicit views of how Isos was performing from a sample of its 20,000 or so rent-paying customers.
The best, in my opinion, was David Kocieniewski's "A Shuffle of Aluminum, but to Banks, Pure Gold," an examination of Goldman Sachs's little-known business of storing aluminum for rent-paying customers.
Inside a detached garage, there's a mobile poultry-slaughter unit, which she rents to customers, and a small-scale hatchery: dozens of tiny quail scurry under bright lights on a bed of pine shavings.
Businesses want to command entire markets and become monopolies to extract profitable rents from customers.
