This research sheds light on consumer motivations for participating in the sharing economy and examines downstream consequences of the uncovered motivations. We use text-mining techniques to extract Airbnb hosts’ motivations from their responses to the question “why did you start hosting.” We find that hosts are driven not only by the monetary motivation “to earn cash,” but also by intrinsic motivations such as “to share beauty” and “to meet people.” Using extensive transaction-level data we find that hosts with intrinsic motivations post more property photos and write longer property descriptions, demonstrating greater engagement with the platform. Consequently, these hosts receive higher guest satisfaction ratings. Compared to hosts who want to earn cash, hosts motivated to meet people are more likely to keep hosting and to stay active on the platform, and hosts motivated to share beauty charge higher prices. As a result, these intrinsically motivated hosts have a higher customer lifetime value compared to those with a monetary motivation. We employ a multi-method approach including text mining, Bayesian latent attrition models and lab experiments to derive these insights. Our research provides an easy-to-implement approach to uncovering consumer motivations in practice and highlights the consequential role of these motivations for firms.
Research has shown that possessions have the power to change consumers’ self-construal and activate different aspects of the self. Building on this literature, the authors suggest that the salience of product ownership not only activates the product-related self but also simultaneously deactivates product-unrelated selves, resulting in impaired performance on tasks unrelated to the activated self. In five experiments, we first elicit feelings of ownership over a product (e.g., a calculator) to activate a product-related identity (e.g., the math self). Participants then engage in a task that is labeled as being a product-related task (e.g., a math task) or a product-unrelated task (e.g., a visual task). Although the task is the same, participants in the ownership condition perform worse on a task labeled as product-unrelated than those in the baseline condition do. Support for the underlying identity activation process comes from the finding that performance impairment is more likely to hold under conditions of low self-concept clarity, in which identity is malleable. The authors discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this finding.
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