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How Consumers Perceive Trustworthiness of Providers in Sharing Economy: Effects of Photos and Comments on Demand at Airbnb

There is limited systematic research that examines how the perceived trustworthiness of providers from photos and consumer comments influences consumer purchasing behavior in a sharing economy platform. In this paper, we develop a theoretical model that explores the mechanism through which consumers’ visual-based trust and text-based trust in providers influence their purchasing behavior. We test our model using data from Airbnb.com—a leading sharing economy platform for short-term rental. Using computer vision, machine learning and natural language processing algorithms we extract and code the variables in our model from photos of and consumer comments about hosts in Airbnb.com.