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  • Airbnb’s reputation system and gender differences among guests: Evidence from large-scale data analysis and a controlled experiment
Title: Airbnb’s reputation system and gender differences among guests: Evidence from large-scale data analysis and a controlled experiment
Sharing economy platforms are rapidly scaling up by reaching increasingly diverse demographics. However, this expansion comes with great difficulties in adequately identifying and responding to everyone’s needs. In this paper, we study gender-related behaviors of guests on the currently most prominent home-sharing platform, Airbnb. While our results confirm the efficacy of Airbnb’s reputation system, we also find that the level of trust and participation on the platform varies by gender. In particular, female solo travelers are more likely to be conscious of review sentiment and choose more often female hosts than male solo travelers. Our findings are obtained by combining exploratory data analysis with large-scale experiment and call for further studies on the usage of sharing economy platforms among subpopulations, informing and improving both policy and practice in these growing online environments.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1755873
NSF-PAR ID:
10148340
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Lecture notes in computer science
ISSN:
0302-9743
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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