Abstract
With the development of social networks and the Internet-based sharing economy, shared short-term rentals are emerging as a new kind of service that provides a convenient way for people to buy short-term rental services in cities through social-network-enabled platforms. However, like other social-network-based services, shared short-term rental is also likely to be impacted by online reviews. This paper aims to investigate the impact of online reviews on users’ purchase decisions toward shared short-term rentals, and further to provide optimization suggestions for the future advance of shared short-term rentals. The contributions of this paper are many-fold. First, we introduce the Stimuli-Organism-Response (SOR) model into the study and propose new variables for the model, including stimulus variables, organism variables, response variable, and moderating variables. Second, we propose eight hypotheses to evaluate the impact of online reviews on users’ purchase decisions toward shared short-term rentals. Finally, we collect data through a questionnaire survey and present comprehensive results on many aspects. Based on the data analysis, we find out that the quality of online reviews impacts users’ perceived value and perceived risk, which in turn impacts users’ purchase decisions toward shared short-term rentals. In addition, the cognitive needs of users can adjust the impact of online reviews on the perceived risk of users but have no explicit adjusting effect for users’ perceived value. Further, we present some research implications as well as suggestions for rental platforms to advance shared short-term rentals in the Internet age.
Highlights
The popularity of the Internet and social networks have made the sharing economy develop rapidly in modern city life [1]
Through summarizing the research literature on the influencing factors of perceived risk of online shopping at home and abroad, we found that perceived risk of consumers mainly comes from three aspects: individual factors, product factors and environmental factors Since online reviews reflect users’ experiences in the real world, we can reasonably assume that online reviews are more reliable than the information provided by shared short-term rentals platforms
The hypotheses H1a, H1b, H2a, and H2b are all established. These assumptions correspond to our Q1 and Q2. This means that the quality of online reviews, which is the independent variable in our research model, has a positive impact on users’ decisions on shared short-term rentals
Summary
The popularity of the Internet and social networks have made the sharing economy develop rapidly in modern city life [1]. Among all sharing economy products, shared short-term rentals have become a recent focus, because of the rapid development of the sustainable-tourism industry [4,5]. An Internet-based platform for shared short-term rentals provides a convenient way for people to sell or buy short-term rental services in cities through the Internet. Felson and Speath first proposed the concept of sharing economy [11]. They argued that sharing economy is an information-technology-based marketplace for platforms created by third parties. The second stage is content sharing on YouTube or life event sharing
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