Does ‘virtue signaling’ pay off for entrepreneurs? We studied 81,799 Airbnb listings to find out

[...]hosts may describe their space as “friendly” or “neighborly” to emphasize warmth, or comment on their “supportive” or “compassionate” nature to show empathy with potential guests. In this experiment, we found that Airbnb listings with a lot of virtue language were more likely to be perceived as...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Conversation : Economy + Business
Main Authors Waddingham, Jacob A, Chandler, Jeff, Wolfe, Marcus
Format Newspaper Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Boston The Conversation US, Inc 15.04.2024
Subjects
Dishonesty
Empathy
Entrepreneurs
Entrepreneurship
Language
Sharing economy
Willingness to pay
United States > US
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Summary:[...]hosts may describe their space as “friendly” or “neighborly” to emphasize warmth, or comment on their “supportive” or “compassionate” nature to show empathy with potential guests. In this experiment, we found that Airbnb listings with a lot of virtue language were more likely to be perceived as dishonest by study participants. Perhaps the most important status symbol on Airbnb is the Superhost badge, which hosts earn over time based on their overall rating, response rate and other quality metrics. Jacob A. Waddingham, Assistant Professor of Management, Texas State University Jeff Chandler, Assistant Professor Of Management, University of North Texas Marcus Wolfe, Associate Professor of Management, University of North Texas