Neutrality May Matter: Sentiment Analysis in Reviews of Airbnb, Booking, and Couchsurfing in Brazil and USA
This highlights a potential bias in review systems for sharing economy users, which could mislead decisions, though it is incremental as it applies known sentiment analysis to a new context.
The study examined whether reviews in sharing economy platforms (Airbnb, Couchsurfing) are more positive than in traditional platforms (Booking.com) in Brazil and the USA, finding that sharing economy reviews tend to be considerably more positive, which may distort user decision-making.
Information and communications technologies have enabled the rise of the phenomenon named sharing economy, which represents activities between people, coordinated by online platforms, to obtain, provide, or share access to goods and services. In hosting services of the sharing economy, it is common to have a personal contact between the host and guest, and this may affect users' decision to do negative reviews, as negative reviews can damage the offered services. To evaluate this issue, we collected reviews from two sharing economy platforms, Airbnb and Couchsurfing, and from one platform that works mostly with hotels (traditional economy), Booking.com, for some cities in Brazil and the USA. Trough a sentiment analysis, we found that reviews in the sharing economy tend to be considerably more positive than those in the traditional economy. This can represent a problem in those systems, as an experiment with volunteers performed in this study suggests. In addition, we discuss how to exploit the results obtained to help improve users' decision making.