Exploring the Over-Time Variation in Customer Concerns on Sharing Economy Services

Abstract

The sharing economy represented by Airbnb has evolved rapidly. It is particularly important to identify and understand how consumer concerns change over time. As a result, this study employs structural topic modelling using room type and time as covariates to extract topics from 896,658 Airbnb reviews in London and to observe the variation in the prevalence of topics over time. The findings show that the topic proportion changed relatively sharply in the early years of Airbnb (2010-2013) and during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2022), but relatively smoothly in the middle period (2014-2019). This research also discovered that the proportion of topics on customers' special experiences has been decreasing while the proportion of topics on their overall experience has been increasing. This shift could be attributed to an increase in the number of professional hosts, which has accelerated the standardisation of the Airbnb service.