Enhancing Customer Civility in the Peer-to-Peer Economy: Empirical Evidence from the Hospitality Sector

Abstract

Customer civility is an established construct in the study of ethical consumption. However, scholars have paid insufficient attention to customer civility in relation to the flourishing peer-to-peer (P2P) economy. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to develop and test a theoretical framework which examines the antecedents of the customer civility in the P2P economy. We use social exchange theory to develop a model that posits customer interaction experiences with property owners, properties, and P2P platforms (e.g., Airbnb) as antecedents of customer civility in the P2P economy. Two studies were used to test our framework: Study 1 comprises a survey of Chinese customers (n = 476); Study 2 involves secondary data crawled from the Web site of Xiaozhu, one of China’s largest P2P accommodation platforms. OLS regression analysis was used for hypothesis testing. Results demonstrate three antecedents of customer civility in the P2P accommodation sector: interpersonal trust, property experience, and platform governance. In addition, the positive effect of interpersonal trust on customer civility is stronger when customers have high economic incentive, while the effect of property experience is significantly stronger when customers have low economic incentive.