The differential impacts of blinded online reviews: Comparing socio-emotional features of guest and host reviews on Airbnb

Chao Yu, Wang Liao*, Drew Margolin

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

This paper investigates the effect of blinding—a policy on certain sharing-economy platforms to suppress online review reciprocation—on the content of reviews from both vendors and customers. While previous studies often focus on customer review or overlook the difference between the two types of reviews, we call attention to their distinct relational nature. We argue that the blinding policy has different impacts on the two types of reviews, and such differences are detectable in a review's linguistic features. We test this logic with mutual reviews (N = 191,526) between Airbnb guests and hosts in New York City during July 10th, 2013 to July 10th, 2015. Using interrupted timeseries analysis, we find that Airbnb's blinding policy on July 10th, 2014 made guest-to-host reviews more objective by reducing prosocial language and positive emotion. In contrast, blinding increased these features in host-to-guest reviews. We also found that this opposite impact of blinding on host-to-guest reviews was stronger when there were fewer opportunities for face-to-face interactions between hosts and guests. We theorize such opposing effects in terms of the ways that blinding alters, rather than eliminates, the relational nature of hosts’ behaviors toward guests. We argue for a broader appreciation of relational dynamics in the theoretical and practical understanding of online sharing-economy platforms.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number101731
JournalTelematics and Informatics
Volume65
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 2021

Keywords

  • Emotion
  • Mutual reviews
  • Prosocial language
  • Quasi-experiment
  • Reciprocity
  • Sharing economy

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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