The Impact Of Host's Face Expression From Sharing Accommodation Platform On Consumers' Rental Intention

Sharing accommodation builds interpersonal connections and creates the feeling of "home" through Sharing space,which emphasizes more interaction and interpersonal relationships than ordinary hotels.As a family member,the host's personal information is disclosed in the sharing accommodation platform,which becomes an additional authentication mechanism and helps users to judge host's credibility.Existing studies have confirmed the important influence of host's reputation and service attitude on consumers' rental intention,while the related research on personal pictures as an intuitive way to understand hosts is still in its infancy.Based on this,we focus on the key information of the facial expressions of the hosts' personal pictures in the sharing accommodation platform,deeply explore its influence on consumers' rent intention,and intend to provide suggestions and references for the hosts and platforms to present personal picture information.Based on the emotional infection theory and trust theory,we believe that consumers can better understand and experience the host's emotions through unconscious imitation when they observing the host's facial expressions,and then produce the same emotional state and behavior with the host through emotional infection.We also think that the host's positive expressions are always social and cooperative,prompting consumers to produce the same emotions and awaken more users trust.On the contrary,neutral expressions,through facial imitation and emotional infection,have a lower arousal to users' trust and are more likely to control their emotions and behaviors,thus reducing consumers' rental intention.Therefore,we put forward four hypotheses,namely,the influence of host's facial expression on consumers' rental intention,the moderation of eye direction,the mediation of trust and the moderation of belief to the trust,and designed six experiments to verify the hypotheses through data mining,eye tracking and situational simulation.The results confirm that:(1)the host's facial expression significantly affects the consumer's rental intention,and the consumer's rental intention is higher under the positive expression compared with the neutral expression.(2)The host's gaze direction plays a moderating role in the process that the host's facial expressions affect the consumers' rental intention.In other words,the enhancement effect of positive expression on the host's rental intention will be weakened under the indirect gaze.(3)Trust plays a mediation role in the process that the host's facial expressions influence consumer's rental intention.It means that,compared with the neutral expression,consumers have more trust under the positive expression,so as to improve their rental intention.(4)Belief plays a moderating role in the process in which facial expressions influence rental intention and in which users' trust influences rental intention.When consumers' belief that "positive expressions represent cooperation and social interaction" is discounted,the positive expressions no longer play a significant role in enhancing users' trust generation and consumers' rental intention.In summary,H1,H2,H3 and H4 are all supported.In general,we explored the internal mechanism and boundary conditions of host's facial expressions affecting consumer's rental intention,refined and expanded research on Fagerstrm,etc.,and strengthened the understanding of the host's picture information.At the same time,we also extend the application context of the emotional infection theory,and provided new way for exploring the pre-factors of user trust in the sharing economy.Similarly,from a practical perspective,we provide guidance for hosts to upload,review and manage personal pictures on the platform,which is also applicable to online carhailing,housekeeping and other online ordering and offline services.We also expanded new ideas for hosts to gain user's trust from the perspective of emotional infection.Of course,in future studies,we can explore the influence of different types(happy,excited,excited,etc.)or different degrees(smiling,laughing)of facial expressions and personal personality characteristics on rental intention.