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Why Airbnb hosts and guests rate each other so highly

On Airbnb, the hosts are uniformly great, the apartments amazing, the locations ideal. Even the dogs attached to the properties are cute and sweet. At least, that’s the impression you get from browsing reviews on the hugely popular online accommodations rental platform. Founded in 2008 by three friends who had air mattresses and a hefty rent burden on a house in San Francisco, Airbnb swears by its “honest, transparent” two-way review system, in which hosts and guests get to rate each other.

What does it mean when all the hosts are great—and all the guests have a wonderful time?

That’s one of the questions about the fast-­growing online sharing economy that Georgios Zervas (GRS’12), an assistant professor of marketing, has been exploring with two colleagues from BU’s College of Arts & Sciences. In an analysis of more than 600,000 Airbnb properties, they found that nearly 95 percent of the listings scored either 4.5 or 5 stars, the highest possible rating. They contrasted this with the ratings of about half a million hotels around the world listed on TripAdvisor, where the average is a much lower 3.8 stars.

Zervas and his colleagues suggest that when guests and hosts are rating each other—and when the transaction feels more personal, as it does on Airbnb, or in the case of Uber, the online ridesharing platform—both parties tend to be more charitable. On Airbnb, the hosts have the option of rejecting a potential guest, so a guest needs favorable reviews just as much as the host does. Reputations are at stake on both sides of the transaction.