A Research On The Influential Factors Of Listing Sales In Short Rental Markets Based On Theory Of Trust

With the rapid development of Internet technology and information technology,as a new business model,sharing economy develops rapidly all over the world.It constantly meets people’s demands in various fields for convenient,varied,high-quality and personalized life.China is one of the important market of sharing economy and has maintained a rapid growth momentum in recent years.With consumers’diversified demand for accommodations improving,the traditional hotel industry has been unable to meet individual needs of users.Short rental markets arise and become an important branch of sharing economy.The rising of short rental platforms such as Tujia and Xiaozhu brings people more choices for accommodations.Trust has been an important research topic in the process of e-commerce development.At the same time,since short rental markets exist information asymmetry,trust acts as a significant factor affecting consumers’ decision making when consumers face unfamiliar hosts.However,which host attributes help build mutual trust and promote the process of transaction between seller and consumer sides has not been studied in details yet.In this paper,based on the theory of trust source and trust transferring,controlling the listing properties in the same time,I investigate the influence of host attributes and host reputation on the consumer choices.From November 2015 to August 2016,employing the Python program,I crawl 8 period data about host as well as listings of xiaozhu.com in three cities---Shanghai,Guangzhou,Chengdu.There are 2227 hosts in our data.Using negative binomial panel regression model,this paper investigates the effects of host attributes and host reputation on sales of listings.Results show that except average time length of reservation confirmation,other variables representing trust source and trust transferring in our model all have significant effects on sales of listings.Variables representing trust source respectively include:online response rate that symbolizes host’s benevolence trust,the acceptance rate of reservations that symbolizes host’s ability trust,whether a host opens personal page or not symbolizing host’s integrity trust and gender of host.Variables representing trust transferring respectively include:the cumulative amount of comments and the cumulative amount of reservations.Robustness test also turther proves that the research model is robust,and host’s personal attributes as well as host reputation all have an impact on sales of listings.This paper has certain theoretical and practical implications.The conclusion of the study provides a new perspective for existing literature and emphasizes the importance of establishing trust during the development of short rental markets.The study also provides some suggestions for platforms and hosts to enhance trust building mechanism.In addition,this paper is the first to study the effects of host attributes and reputation on sales of listings using real data of website from the perspective of short rental markets in China.It is an important supplement for current literature that only employs research methods such as questionnaire,interview and experiment.