Enhancing Customer Civility in the Peer-to-Peer Economy: Empirical Evidence from the Hospitality Sector
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Enhancing Customer Civility in the Peer-to-Peer Economy: Empirical Evidence from the Hospitality Sector Shuang Ma1 · Huimin Gu1 · Daniel P. Hampson2 · Yonggui Wang2 Received: 3 July 2018 / Accepted: 9 February 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract Customer civility is an established construct in the study of ethical consumption. However, scholars have paid insufficient attention to customer civility in relation to the flourishing peer-to-peer (P2P) economy. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to develop and test a theoretical framework which examines the antecedents of the customer civility in the P2P economy. We use social exchange theory to develop a model that posits customer interaction experiences with property owners, properties, and P2P platforms (e.g., Airbnb) as antecedents of customer civility in the P2P economy. Two studies were used to test our framework: Study 1 comprises a survey of Chinese customers (n = 476); Study 2 involves secondary data crawled from the Web site of Xiaozhu, one of China’s largest P2P accommodation platforms. OLS regression analysis was used for hypothesis testing. Results demonstrate three antecedents of customer civility in the P2P accommodation sector: interpersonal trust, property experience, and platform governance. In addition, the positive effect of interpersonal trust on customer civility is stronger when customers have high economic incentive, while the effect of property experience is significantly stronger when customers have low economic incentive. Keywords Customer civility · Customer interaction experience · Economic incentive · P2P economy · Social exchange theory
Introduction The peer-to-peer (P2P) economy, defined as the “peer-topeer-based activity of obtaining, giving, or sharing access to goods and services, coordinated through community-based online services” (Hamari et al. 2016, p. 2047), presents Shuang Ma, Huimin Gu, Daniel P. Hampson, and Yonggui Wang have contributed equally to this work. * Huimin Gu [email protected] Shuang Ma [email protected] Daniel P. Hampson [email protected] Yonggui Wang [email protected] 1
School of Tourism Sciences, Beijing International Studies University, Beijing, China
Business School, University of International Business and Economics, Beijing, China
2
economic opportunities and promotes environmentally and societally advantageous behaviors, such as sustainable consumption (Ert et al. 2016; Yin et al. 2018; Zervas et al. 2017). Airbnb, created in 2008 and now the preeminent P2P accommodation platform, has a higher valuation than Marriott International, the world’s largest hotel chain (Akbar and Tracogna 2018). Booking.com, the world’s largest hotel rental website, now also promotes private homes (USA Today 2018). However, recent media coverage of the P2P economy has been permeated by examples of unethical behavior. Property owners have been found using cameras to spy on guests, raising distrust and perceived risk among consumers (Adams 2018). Coverage also points to customer inc
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