The signaling effect of group-type profile pictures in the sharing economy: The case of Airbnb

Abstract

While Airbnb hosts may publish various details of their property on the online platform to persuade travelers to make bookings, they choose to post limited information about themselves, except their profile pictures. Based on the signaling and uncertainty reduction theories, we focus on the impact of host profile pictures on bookings and hypothesize that (1) the presence of a profile picture induces the travelers to trust the host more, (2) the number of people in a picture, a proxy for sociality in trustworthiness, increases bookings, and (3) these two impacts are intensified for properties in risky neighborhoods. Collecting profile pictures of 14,799 hosts on Airbnb, we utilized a deep learning-based face detection technique to extract the number of different faces in a profile and ran random effects models to test our hypotheses. This study is unique in its using archival data to show the impact of profile pictures on bookings.