Abstract
The innovative service of photo verification is now offered by major home-sharing platforms. It remains unclear, however, whether and how a peer provider’s adoption of the platform’s photo verification service influences the provider’s sales performance. We draw on the theory of motivated information management to argue that verified photos are a crucial visual and experiential cue to reduce customer uncertainty regarding the properties and peer providers. We collect observational data from a leading home-sharing platform in China and utilize the propensity score matching method to account for endogeneity. Our results show that after adopting photo verification service, peer providers benefited from an improved sales performance in terms of revenue and rent days. The positive effect is stronger for properties with a source of greater uncertainty: (1) properties that lack certification and (2) properties with fewer customer reviews.
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