An investigation on online reviews in sharing economy driven hospitality platforms: A viewpoint of trust

This study empirically investigates the effect of online review contents on potential guests’ trust perceptions in AirBnB.com and suggests salient themes determine trust perception.

Abstract

Members on both sides of the sharing economy transaction must trust each other to act in good faith. This study empirically investigates the effect of online review contents on potential guests’ trust perceptions in AirBnB.com. Six thematic characteristics of accommodation experiences were found as salient themes from online review contents, and corresponding relationships regarding trust perceptions were investigated: Through content analysis and theme extraction in python, our results show the salient cognitive themes are room aesthetics, host attributes, location, repurchase intention, overall evaluation and room description. Trust perceptions were both evaluated by individual coders and predicted by a convolutional neural network. Results suggest salient themes determine trust perception: Host attributes positively lead to benevolence, location and room aesthetics positively affect ability, room description positively affects integrity, and location and host attributes determine overall trust perception.