Exploring the language of the sharing economy: Building trust and reducing privacy concern on Airbnb in German and English

Alex Zarifis, Richard Ingham and Julia Kroenung

Cogent Business & Management, 2019, vol. 6, issue 1, 1666641

Abstract: Several countries’ economies have been disrupted by the sharing economy. Global champions like Airbnb and Uber use similar models and platforms across many countries. However, each country and its consumers have different characteristics including the language used. The text in the profile of those offering their properties in England in English and in Germany in German, are compared to explore whether trust is built, and privacy concerns are reduced in the same way. Six methods of building trust are used by the landlords: (1) the level of formality, (2) distance and proximity, (3) emotiveness and humor, (4) being assertive and passive aggressive, (5) conformity to the platform language style and terminology and (6) setting boundaries. Privacy concerns are not usually reduced directly as this is left to the platform. The findings indicate that language has a limited influence and the platform norms and habits are the biggest influence.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/23311975.2019.1666641 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:oabmxx:v:6:y:2019:i:1:p:1666641

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://cogentoa.tandfonline.com/journal/OABM20

DOI: 10.1080/23311975.2019.1666641

Access Statistics for this article

Cogent Business & Management is currently edited by Len Tiu Wright and Tahir Nisar

More articles in Cogent Business & Management from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().