Faculty Publication: Dr. Zeng

September 2021

Xu, X., Zeng, S. and He, Y., 2021. The impact of information disclosure on consumer purchase behavior on sharing economy platform Airbnb. International Journal of Production Economics, 231, p.107846.

Our research examines the role of information disclosure in influencing consumers’ purchase behavior on Airbnb, the room sharing platform. Specifically, I wrote a program to scrape off data from Airbnb website across eight major cities in U.S. To measure consumer demand for an Airbnb room, we use the number of reviews for the room as a proxy. The data we collected include information about the room, the host, and information contributed by peer consumers such as ratings.

I am very interested in the reasons behind the success of the sharing economy business model during the past decade. Being an e-commerce sharing economy platform, Airbnb is at the center of my research and teaching interest. Through data collection and model building, I contributed to the e-commerce literature, and more importantly, demonstrated to my students how business analytics work in real life.

We found that demand of a room positively correlates with the amount of details about the room posted, the trustworthiness and responsiveness of hosts, and positive ratings from past guests. Surprisingly, the demand is lower when hosts post links to their personal or professional social network profiles. We also found that in some cities demand significantly correlates with the gender of the host(s). In general our research provides guidance for such platforms on how to optimize information presentation.