The Impact of Discrepancies between Offerors’ Self-Disclosure and Customers’ Reviews on Online Sales of Experiences in Sharing Economy

ABSTRACTExperience sharing is becoming popular as customers increasingly respond to the rapid platform technology development. However, because of format diversity and quality variation, customers refer to multiple information sources before booking. Two of the most important information sources are the hosts' self-disclosure texts about the experience project and customers' online reviews. Using natural language processing (NLP) techniques, we analyze the data from Airbnb experience projects. We find that the information discrepancies in hosts' self-disclosure texts of the experience project and customers' online reviews, in terms of their focus on the attributes of products and services and the linguistic styles, exist, and these discrepancies affect sales. Hosts elaborate more on the descriptive attributes, whereas customers focus mainly on individual perceptions in their reviews. Customers also write online reviews in a more concise, diverse, and relaxed fashion, conveying positive emotion and a more subjective tone than expressed by hosts' project descriptions. Additionally, a large topic difference, reflected by customers' more details about various attributes elaborated in their online reviews compared with the attributes described by the hosts in the project description, increases sales. Further, a larger discrepancy in length and diversity increases sales, whereas a larger discrepancy in subjectivity reduces sales. Compared with the online mode, the in-person mode strengthens the impact of content and linguistic discrepancies on sales. This study's findings will help hosts and sharing economy platforms use a relative approach to optimize their information provision and exploit the electronic word-of-mouth effect to improve customers' online purchase intention and behavior.KEYWORDS AND PHRASES: Information provisiononline self-disclosureonline reviewsexperience sharingsharing economytext miningexperience economyonline platforms Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALSupplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10864415.2023.2255109Additional informationNotes on contributorsYiru WangYiru Wang (yiru.wang@oswego.edu) is an assistant professor of marketing at the State University of New York at Oswego. She holds a Ph.D. in marketing from Kent State University. Dr. Wang's research interests center on platform economy, including online word-of-mouth, user–platform interactions, and the sharing economy. She has published in such journals as Journal of Advertising Research and Public Health.Yilong ZhengYilong Zheng (zhengy@merrimack.edu) is an assistant professor of marketing at Merrimack College. He holds a Ph.D. in marketing from the State University of New York at Binghamton. Dr. Zheng's research focuses on collective wisdom in crowdsourcing, entrepreneurial marketing, digital analytics education, and wine marketing. He has published in such journals as Computers in Human Behavior, Journal of Business Research, Issues in Information Systems, and Marketing Education Review.Xun XuXun Xu (xunxu@csudh.edu; corresponding author) is an associate professor in the Department of Information Systems and Operations Management in the College of Business Administration and Public Policy at California State University, Dominguez Hills. He holds a Ph.D. in operations management from Washington State University. Dr. Xu's research interests include service operations management, supply chain management and coordination, sustainability, e-commerce, data and text mining, and hospitality and tourism management. He has published more than 60 papers in such journals as Decision Sciences, Decision Support Systems, European Journal of Operational Research, Information and Management, International Journal of Electronic Commerce, International Journal of Hospitality Management, International Journal of Information Management, International Journal of Production Economics, International Journal of Production Research, Journal of the Operational Research Society, Journal of Travel Research, Omega, Technovation, and others.