A computational framework for understanding antecedents of guests' perceived trust towards hosts on Airbnb
Authors: Zhang, Le; Yan, Qiang; Zhang, Leihan
Journal: Decision Support Systems (2018)
DOI: 10.1016/j.dss.2018.10.002
Several studies have researched the antecedents influencing the perceived trust of guests towards hosts on Airbnb typically relying on survey data. However, the contribution of these antecedents to trust building in a practical context remains unclear. To fill this gap, we focused on the antecedents within the manageable information about hosts and proposed a computational framework for understanding the antecedents influencing perceived trust. Specifically, perceived trust was proxied by the growth rate of bookings and the validity of the proxy method was proved through comparing with human labeled data. From the snapshot information about hosts, the antecedents were quantified through text mining and face recognition methods. The least square regression was applied to analyze and compare the influence of these antecedents. We found that the contribution of reputation is not less than the summation of all the other antecedents. Additionally, in terms of selfdescriptions, it is worthwhile to pay more attention to interactions and services. Expressing positive sentiment in either self-descriptions or profile photo is also helpful. The response behavior pattern and the number of ver…