Quality Standards, Service Orientation, and Power in Airbnb and Couchsurfing

Although Couchsurfing and Airbnb are both online communities that help users host strangers in their homes, they differ in an important sense: Couchsurfing prohibits monetary payment while Airbnb is built around it.We conducted interviews with users experienced on both Couchsurfing and Airbnb ("dual-users") to better understand systemic differences between the platforms. Based on these interviews we propose that, compared to Couchsurfing, Airbnb: (1) appears to require higher quality services, (2) places more emphasis on places over people, and (3) shifts social power from hosts to guests. Using public profiles from both platforms, we present analyses exploring each theme. Finally, we present evidence showing that Airbnb's growth has coincided with a decline in Couchsurfing. Taken together, our findings paint a complex picture of the changing character of network hospitality.

[1]  K. Charmaz,et al.  Constructing Grounded Theory , 2014 .

[2]  J. Trost.  Statistically nonrepresentative stratified sampling: A sampling technique for qualitative studies , 1986 .

[3]  Michael Luca,et al.  Digital Discrimination: The Case of Airbnb.com , 2014 .

[4]  Jennie Germann Molz.  Toward a network hospitality , 2014, First Monday.

[5]  Tawanna Dillahunt,et al.  The Promise of the Sharing Economy among Disadvantaged Communities , 2015, CHI.

[6]  Airi Lampinen.  Hosting Together via Couchsurfing: Privacy Management in the Context of Network Hospitality , 2016 .

[7]  D. Ariely,et al.  Effort for Payment , 2004, Psychological science.

[8]  J. Pennebaker,et al.  The Psychological Meaning of Words: LIWC and Computerized Text Analysis Methods , 2010 .

[9]  Debra Lauterbach,et al.  Surfing a Web of Trust: Reputation and Reciprocity on CouchSurfing.com , 2009, 2009 International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering.

[10]  Jennie Germann Molz,et al.  SOCIAL NETWORKING TECHNOLOGIES AND THE MORAL ECONOMY OF ALTERNATIVE TOURISM: THE CASE OF COUCHSURFING.ORG , 2013 .

[11]  Y. Benkler.  'Sharing Nicely': On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production , 2004 .

[12]  Rachel Botsman,et al.  What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption , 2010 .

[13]  Loren G. Terveen,et al.  Avoiding the South Side and the Suburbs: The Geography of Mobile Crowdsourcing Markets , 2015, CSCW.

[14]  K. Cook,et al.  Power, Equity and Commitment in Exchange Networks , 1978 .

[15]  David R. Schaefer,et al.  Building Solidarity through Generalized Exchange: A Theory of Reciprocity1 , 2007, American Journal of Sociology.

[16]  Michael Luca,et al.  Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment , 2016 .

[17]  Uichin Lee,et al.  Social or Financial Goals?: Comparative Analysis of User Behaviors in Couchsurfing and Airbnb , 2016, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[18]  Eric Gilbert,et al.  VADER: A Parsimonious Rule-Based Model for Sentiment Analysis of Social Media Text , 2014, ICWSM.

[19]  John M. Carroll,et al.  Towards community-centered support for peer-to-peer service exchange: rethinking the timebanking metaphor , 2014, CHI.

[20]  John M. Carroll,et al.  A Muddle of Models of Motivation for Using Peer-to-Peer Economy Systems , 2015, CHI.

[21]  Airi Lampinen,et al.  Monetizing Network Hospitality: Hospitality and Sociability in the Context of Airbnb , 2015, CSCW.

[22]  A. Fiske.  The four elementary forms of sociality: framework for a unified theory of social relations. , 1992, Psychological review.

[23]  M. Mauss.  The gift : Forms and functions of exchange in Archaic Societies / Marcel Mauss , 2020 .

[24]  Airi Lampinen,et al.  Indebtedness and reciprocity in local online exchange , 2013, CSCW.

[25]  C. Lévi-Strauss.  The Elementary Structures of Kinship , 1969 .

[26]  Bogdan State.  From Power to Status in Online Exchange , 2012 .