Assessing Influencing Factors in Consumer Trust on the Airbnb Platform

Abstract

Since its rise, the sharing economy has maintained sustained and rapid development, bringing transformative innovations and challenges to various traditional industries such as shared travel and shared accommodation. Sharing economy is a social and economic ecosystem that matches the demand with the idle resources and cognitive surplus of a large number of dispersed individuals or organizations through network technology platforms as intermediaries. However, the establishment of laws and regulations suitable for the sharing economy lags behind business practices, and the outbreak of many negative events will destroy the trust and confidence of participants in the sharing economy, thus affecting their willingness to participate. How to ensure the sustainable and healthy development of the sharing economy is very important. Much of the research literature on online trust shows that trust plays a key role in reducing the complexity of online transactions and promoting the success of online transactions. However, since the establishment of trust depends on the situational factors of exchange activities, the influencing factors and mechanisms of trust establishment in traditional commercial activities, e-commerce and sharing economy are different. Therefore, it is of great theoretical and practical significance to study the trust building mechanism in the new scenario of sharing economy. Based on the stimulus-body-response model, this paper collects data through situational surveys, and uses structural equation modeling (SEM) to analyze the differences in the impact of different information on trust and distrust, as well as the impact of trust and distrust on consumers' purchase intentions. The results show that trust and distrust have a significant impact on consumers' purchase intention in Airbnb; landlord photos and landlord self-description mainly increase consumer trust, while online reviews and ratings mainly reduce consumer distrust; at the same time, different types of consumers attach different importance to various information.