Explaining reputation inflation on Airbnb: The role of users’ perceived service quality

Online reviews by customers are of key importance in the platform economy. This particularly goes for sharing economy platforms such as Airbnb which rely on online customer reviews to ensure safe consumer-to-consumer interactions through which strangers share personal, underutilized goods such as their home or car (Frenken and Schor, 2017; Oskam and Boswijk, 2016). Available evidence however suggests that online customer reviews on Airbnb are heavily skewed towards positive ratings (Fradkin et al., 2018; Teubner and Glaser, 2018; Zervas et al., 2015). This implies that online reputations of Airbnb hosts may be overly inflated. The current study seeks to further uncover the possibility of online reputation inflation by explaining why Airbnb users do (not) leave online reviews. Namely, one of the explanations for online reputation inflation rests in the possibility that satisfied Airbnb users are more likely to leave online reviews in comparison to those who are dissatisfied (and therefore, are less likely to leave online reviews). In line with this, we examine whether customer perceptions of service quality is a relevant antecedent to why customers leave online reviews. By drawing on insights from conservation of resource theory and social exchange theory, we build and test the hypothesis that the relationship between service quality and online reviewing is linear and positive (i.e. satisfied users are more likely to leave online reviews than dissatisfied users).