Privacy Policy and Hosts’ Concerns on Accommodation Sharing Platforms

Abstract

Accommodation-sharing services are gaining great popularity via online community platforms in recent years. Meanwhile, users’ privacy concerns over social interactions and online transactions on these platforms are escalating. This study investigates whether and how privacy policy can properly mitigate hosts’ privacy concerns, enhance perceived benefits, and subsequently encourage their information disclosure on the accommodation sharing platforms (ASPs). Through a scenario-based survey and a controlled experiment, we find that the hosts are more concerned about the other users’ misappropriating the private information that the hosts disclose on the platform than the platforms’ privacy invasion behaviors. However, this major concern is not significantly mitigated by the current privacy policy. Moreover, privacy policy engenders two types of perceived benefits, among which the perceived social benefit has a stronger effect than economic benefit on the hosts’ intentions to disclose information on ASPs.