Effects of host incentives on multiple listings in accommodation sharing

Abstract

Purpose

Despite the importance of hosts who contribute to the success of accommodation sharing through sharing underutilized space with guests, current literature sheds little light on what exactly incentivizes hosts to grow their properties. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of multifaceted motivations including financial benefits, online social interaction and membership seniority and their interplay on hosts’ multiple listing behavior.

Design/methodology/approach

The study is instantiated on real-world business data collected from an accommodation-sharing platform in China. The data set includes 3,199 observations of 252 multi-listing hosts in Beijing who managed 815 properties from September 2012 to October 2016.

Findings

The study discloses that financial benefits, online social interaction and membership seniority significantly incentivize hosts to list multiple properties on the accommodation-sharing platform. In particular, the social incentive is the most important driver among the three. With a 1 per cent increase in online social interactions, the number of properties operated by a host would increase by 13.5 per cent. While the financial benefits and online social interaction motivate hosts to engage in the multi-listing behavior, such effects are significantly mitigated as the membership seniority increases.

Research limitations/implications

This study adds to the extant literature a unique yet less researched perspective of supply expansion driven by hosts. It also provides important practical implications for managing multiple properties for a healthy and viable accommodation-sharing community.

Originality/value

While a majority of the extant research on the sharing economy primarily takes a consumer-related perspective, this study addresses a different and original topic about hosts’ multiple-listing behavior that drives the supply of accommodation sharing. It is a first empirical investigation of the increase of accommodation sharing supply with host motivations explained.

Citation

Xie, K.L. and Chen, Y. (2019), "Effects of host incentives on multiple listings in accommodation sharing", International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Vol. 31 No. 4, pp. 1995-2013. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-02-2018-0145