Peer-to-peer interactions: Perspectives of Airbnb guests and hosts

In peer-to-peer (P2P) accommodation settings such as Airbnb, social interactions between peers are distinctively different from those between guests and employees in conventional lodging establishments. This study focuses on a reciprocal aspect of social interactions in P2P accommodations and aims to: 1) explore how guests and hosts perceive online and face-to-face interactions between them and 2) investigate the association between P2P interactions and some outcome variables (encounter satisfaction, word-of-mouth intention, and continuous intention to use) based on the roles of guest and host. A total of 503 responses from an online research panel were analyzed. The results show that guests perceive overall interaction experiences more positively than do hosts. Moreover, guests and hosts place weight on different interaction factors that contribute to their satisfaction and behavioral intentions. This study sheds light on the reciprocal interactions between guests and hosts, providing important theoretical and practical implications for the P2P lodging experience.     

Factors predicting attitude toward disclosing personal data online

To test a theoretical model, this study explores the effect of anxiety, trust, personality, and perceived benefits on the disclosure of personal information online. An online survey conducted among participants in the United States (n = 248, age range: 20–82 years) examined attitudes toward disclosing personal data online. Specifically, the study researches the impact of anxiety disclosing personal data, trust (both in the Internet and in institutions), the Big Five personality traits, and four sets of perceived shopping benefits (opportunity, bargain, purchase, and expected privacy benefits) in e-commerce disclosure and their role as antecedents for adoption and use of e-commerce. The study aligns with existing trust literature and corroborates other findings on how perceived purchase benefits impact individuals’ attitudes toward disclosing personal data online. The data suggest that both trust in the Internet and trust in institutions positively influence attitude toward disclosing personal data online. Perceived purchase benefits were also significant positive predictors for attitude toward disclosing personal data online. Furthermore, personality dimensions can affect attitude toward disclosing: the more neurotic a person is, the more negative their attitude is about disclosing personal data online. The study underscores that consumers have a responsibility to educate themselves about online disclosure and marketing practices, and about how to protect their online privacy. Most importantly, fostering trust, reducing anxiety, and promoting benefits are essential to the future of e-commerce. Implications for theory, consumers, marketing practice, and public policy are also discussed.     

Better safe than sorry: Why organizations in crisis should never hesitate to steal thunder

When organizations are confronted with a crisis, they sometimes have the opportunity to decide whether or not to disclose that information. Organizations may hesitate to reveal such negative events out of fear of drawing unnecessary attention to the crisis, legal liability, or other related problems. The aim of this article is to discuss the pros and cons of self-disclosure and to offer tools to public relations practitioners that will help convince management of the advantages of self-disclosure in a time of crisis—what has been labeled stealing thunder. Research repeatedly has illustrated several valuable ways in which the self-disclosure of crises can benefit organizations in trouble, the most important of which is that it allows organizations to behave in an ethical manner. The article also lists and refutes several arguments often given in favor of crisis concealment and aims to clarify why organizations should never hesitate when they have the opportunity to self-disclose a crisis.     

The mechanism of trust and distrust formation and their relational outcomes

By incorporating distrust as a distinct entity from trust, the current study proposes a mechanism by which trust and distrust are formed and manifested in behavioral intentions in the context of business-to-consumer (B2C) Internet exchange relationships. Specifically this paper investigates the way consumers’ evaluations of an e-vendor's business operations relate to their judgments of trustworthiness (i.e., competence and benevolence of the e-vendor) and how such judgments shape consumer trust and distrust. This paper also examines two different behavioral intentions (i.e., consumers’ self-disclosure and willingness to commit) as outcomes of consumer trust and distrust. The proposed relationships are tested across two online purchasing contexts, books and clothing. Our framework receives strong support from the data. In particular, results support the proposition that trust and distrust are shaped by different dimensions of trustworthiness, and trust affects behavior intentions differently from distrust.     

The power of beauty: Be your ideal self in online reviews—an empirical study based on face detection

Beauty can increase people's self-confidence and offer premium benefits in social activities. Unlike natural appearance, beauty on the internet depends greatly on people's ideal selves. Different from previous research, this study investigated the relationship between profile image's facial beauty and online reviews. Based on 25,322 face detection results, our findings showed that people's behaviors corresponded to their created beautiful self-image, which resulted in posting negative and detailed online reviews. Moreover, beauty diminished the inhibiting effect caused by clear facial disclosure. Our results enrich the understanding of online beauty, self-presentation, self-disclosure, and rating bias in online shopping platforms. The practical implications for online platforms are also discussed.     

The effect of employee behavior on brand personality impressions and brand attitudes

This research examines how consumers update their brand personality impressions and brand attitudes after interacting with one of the brand's employees. Drawing on stereotyping theory, the author develops a framework that proposes that the impact of an employee's behavior depends on how the employee is categorized. When the employee is considered primarily as an exemplar of the brand's workforce, his or her behavior is generalized more strongly to the brand. When, however, the employee is judged as a relatively unique individual (i.e., when the employee is subtyped), the behavior is not transferred to the brand to the full extent. The results of three studies provide converging evidence and show that the degree to which consumers subtype an employee is determined by the amount of information they possess about the employee, the extent to which they depend on the employee, and their motivation to form an accurate impression. The findings have direct implications for marketers interested in understanding how employees affect the brands they represent.

Employee encouragement of self-disclosure in the service encounter and its impact on customer satisfaction

In the service encounter, the employee must often encourage customer self-disclosure (i.e., revealing of personal information) to be able to match the customer's needs with what the firm has to offer. This study uses an experimental approach to manipulate employee encouragement of self-disclosure (low vs. high) to explore its impact on the customer. It was found that encouraging self-disclosure enhanced customer perceptions of customization, employee effort, own effort, privacy concerns, and employee humanness, and that these responses influenced customer satisfaction. In addition, because many firms are beginning to replace human employees with various forms of virtual agents (and it has been argued that we humans may find it less threatening to self-disclose to such agents), the identity of the employee (virtual agent vs. human employee) was manipulated, too. The identity factor, however, did not influence customers' responses.