Social, Behavioral and Experimental Economics Seminar: Ginger Jin
Safety Reviews on Airbnb: An Information Tale
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Abstract
Many online platforms facilitate and publish user reviews in order to build trust between anonymous buyers and sellers. At the same time, platforms can also monitor, filter and remove certain user reviews, even if they reflect the true experiences of buyers. Using Airbnb and official crime data in five major U.S. cities, we study a December 2019 Airbnb policy that has a potential to remove and discourage reviews about the safety of a listing’s vicinity. It is unclear how Airbnb implements this policy, but counterfactual simulation suggests that a complete removal of vicinity safety reviews would hurt guests and increase revenues from reservations on Airbnb, with positive sorting toward listings with such vicinity safety reviews. Conversely, highlighting vicinity safety reviews as if the guest had written a vicinity safety review out of her previous experience would generate opposite effects. Because vicinity safety reviews are more closely correlated with official crime statistics in low-income and minority neighborhoods, our findings suggest that suppressing or highlighting vicinity safety reviews would have different effects on different neighborhoods.
Authors
Aron Culotta (Tulane)
Ginger Zhe Jin (U of Maryland & NBER)
Yidan Sun (Illinois Institute of Technology)
Liad Wagman (Illinois Institute of Technology)
Speaker bio
Ginger Zhe Jin is currently professor of economics at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also the ADVANCE Professor of the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the University since September 2021. In 2015-2017, she was on leave at the Federal Trade Commission, serving as the director of the FTC Bureau of Economics from January 2016 to July 2017. From January 2019 to May 2020, she was on leave at Amazon.com as Amazon Scholar and senior principal economist.
Most of her research focuses on information asymmetry among economic agents and how to provide information to overcome the information problem. The applications she has studied include retail food safety, health insurance, prescription drugs, e-commerce, regulatory inspection, scientific innovation, air quality, blood donation, vaccination, intrafamilial interaction, data regulation and consumer protection. Her research has been published in leading economics, management and marketing journals, with support from the National Science Foundation, the Net Institute and the Sloan Foundation. Many of her works have been covered by major media outlets including Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, Bloomberg and Los Angeles Times.
She is currently co-editor of Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, associate editor of RAND Journal of Economics, advisory council member of Journal of Industrial Economics and board member of Industrial Organization Society. She has been research associate of NBER since 2012.
In October 2014, she co-founded Hazel Analytics, an analytics company that promotes the use of open government data.
She received her PhD in economics from UCLA in 2000.