Airnbn. Social Interactions or Business Transactions?

Giovanni Quattrone, Middlesex University

Seminar based on this research paper http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/l.capr...

In the context of the sharing economy, a key question is whether Airbnb is a hospitality service that fosters social exchanges between hosts and guests, as the sharing economy manifesto originally stated, or whether it is (or is evolving into being) a purely business transaction platform, the way hotels have traditionally operated. To answer these questions, the researchers built a machine learning framework that mined millions of guest reviews to distinguish which ones were about social interactions or which were about business transactions. It turns out that, year after year, business transactions are overtaking social interactions. The good news is that early adopters who tended to be more social when they joined tend to be still so nowadays.