The Dilemma Of The Black Airbnb Host: To “Whitewash” Or Not?

Abstract

This research investigated the effectiveness of Black Airbnb operators who whitewash their Airbnb listings for the purpose of building trust and ultimately increasing booking intention. In the housing industry, whitewashing is a practice of non-White homeowners removing their images from their homes to increase valuation. Prior studies on whitewashing focused on various subjects of the homeowners, including education and corporate professionalism. Since the introduction of the Airbnb digital platform in 2007, over 4 million Airbnb hosts have opened their doors to over 1 billion guests worldwide among which a growing number of hosts are Black. This study used perceived congruence as a framework to explore the impact on building trust and increasing booking intention on the Airbnb platform. The research relied upon quantitative inquiry methods to determine the drivers that influenced establishing trust and booking intention on the digital peer-to-peer platform, Airbnb. A survey instrument was developed and administered on the crowdsourcing platform Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). This survey instrument included replica Airbnb listings developed with the intention to indicate the race of the host based on visual illustrations, artwork, and name of host. This research revealed that race does matter when it comes to trust and booking intention. Both White and Black Airbnb guests were significantly influenced by images that provided cues to the race of the host. The goal of this research was to fill a gap in existing the existing literature dedicated to whitewashing, aid in the effort to better understand the mechanisms of consumer behavior on the Airbnb platform and examine the long-term ramifications of barriers that limit access for Black participants to the platform economy. Keywords: Airbnb, shared economy, congruence, trust, purchasing intentio