Self-Disclosure and Perceived Trustworthiness of Airbnb Host Profiles

ABSTRACT: Online peer-to-peer platforms like Airbnb allow hosts to list a property (eg a house, or a room) for short-term rentals. In this work, we examine how hosts describe themselves on their Airbnb profile pages. We use a mixed-methods study to develop a categorization of the topics that hosts self-disclose in their profile descriptions, and show that these topics differ depending on the type of guest engagement expected. We also examine the perceived trustworthiness of profiles using topic-coded profiles from 1,200 hosts, ...