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Klein, Maximilian, Jinhao Zhao, Jiajun Ni, Isaac Johnson, Benjamin Mako Hill,
and Haiyi Zhu. 2017. “Quality Standards, Service Orientation, and Power in
Airbnb and Couchsurfing.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
1 (CSCW): 58:1–58:21. https://doi.org/10.1145/3134693.

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From: Karrie Karahalios, Geraldine Fitzpatrick, and Andrés Monroy-Hernández
<cscw18a@precisionconference.com>
Date: Tue, Jun 13, 2017 at 7:32 PM
Subject: Decision on submission 1148 of CSCW 2018 Online First
To: Maximilian Klein <isalix@gmail.com>
Dear Maximilian Klein -
Congratulations!
Your paper:
1148 - Cool air breezing off the surf: Power dependence and standards in
Airbnb and Couchsurfing
is one of the 54% of CSCW 2018 Online First submissions invited to revise
and resubmit. There were 386 total submissions to CSCW 2018 Online First.
The reviewers for this submission believe that it has the potential to be
revised within four weeks -- revisions are due July 10, 2017 -- to become a
contribution to what will be an exceptional conference.
The program committee expects all authors to take advantage of this four
week revision period to improve their submissions by addressing reviewers'
comments (below). Some submissions need only minor revisions, while others
will require considerable work over the next four weeks to result in an
acceptable submission, and will not succeed without significant effort.
Your reviews, especially the summary report from the AC, should make clear
what you should do. You can gauge your prospects from your reviews and the
summary report: overall scores of 4s and 5s indicate the reviewers are very
confident your paper will be acceptable within four weeks with small edits.
Overall scores of 3 and 4 indicate you have some work to do. Scores of 3
and below indicate that some reviewers have serious reservations, though
other reviewers see promise.
The same reviewers will read and evaluate your revised submission (though
additional reviewers may be added for papers where the reviewers are
divided). You need not satisfy every reviewer or make every suggested
change, but your revision will need to convince most of the reviewers that
it is now ready for publication. For some papers the reviewers have
requested a lot of work, you might feel that it is too much to achieve in a
four week period. If you have the time to reach that goal: great! If not,
that is okay, you are free to withdraw your submission. Please decide
whether or not the key points made by reviewers can be adequately addressed
in the time provided, given other demands on your time. Papers that are
revised and re-submitted in the next round will receive revised reviews.
Your revision must be accompanied by a separate "Summary of Changes"
document (in PDF format) that lists the reviewers' comments and your
responses, even for comments that did not lead to changes in the manuscript
(in which case you might explain why you chose not to make certain
suggested changes). This could be a set of bullet points, a table, or
numbered points by which reviewers' comments are summarized along with your
changes. This is not a rebuttal, but rather a description of changes made,
or of reasons you could not or chose not to take the reviewers' advice. To
become acceptable, your submission must be revised, and your document
describing the changes will greatly help reviewers see what you have or
have not changed, along with your reasons for doing so.
Just to be clear, you must submit a revised paper and summary of changes by
the deadline. Any paper where a revision and summary are not submitted
will be considered to be withdrawn.
Example summaries from past years' papers can be found at
http://cs.stanford.edu/~merrie/temp/change_log_samples.html
Please submit your revision and the response document at your "Submissions
in Progress" page at https://new.precisionconference.com/sigchi by 11:59 PM
PDT, July 10, 2017.
CSCW 2018 will be a great conference, and we sincerely hope you are part of
it! If you have any issues or questions, please let us know. And thanks
again for submitting.
Sincerely,
Karrie Karahalios, Geraldine Fitzpatrick, and Andrés Monroy-Hernández
CSCW 2018 Online First Co-chairs
----------------------------------------------------------------
AC review
score 4/5
Confidence
Confident
First Round Overall Recommendation
Probably acceptable (with minor modifications)
Contribution and Criteria for Evaluation
First Round Review from AC (if needed)
Coordinator's First-Round Report to Authors
This paper comparing AirBNB and Couchsurfing was well-received by
reviewers, who
thought it was well-written and used a strong multi-methodological
approach to
study differences in guest-host relationships.The authors also agree
this study is
a good fit with the CSCW community.
Please carefully read through the reviewers' comments to address the
questions and
suggestions. For example, R1 raises a good point about comparing these
sites to
Uber because of the agency (or lack thereof) in choosing one's "host."
R2 was most critical of the paper, and provides a number of suggestions
related to
the theoretical framing and the authors' interpretation of the data.
Finally, one aspect on which these papers are judged is whether the
contribution
matches the length. The paper is on the long side, although perhaps
that is
justified, especially with the tables/figures, but I was disappointed
in the
length of the discussion. I don't know exactly how the authors could
address this
without adding length, but I definitely want to see a more explicit
discussion of
how this paper extends our existing knowledge around the sharing
economy.
Requested Revisions
See above.
Formatting and Reference Issues
R2 notes (and I agree) that the paper should be revised to read more
academic and
less colloquial.
The reviewers also point to related work on the sharing economy,
including
research by Airi Lampinen (who publishes at CSCW).
Finally, the reviewers noted some grammatical issues, and R1 was
confused by the
paper's title.
Author Response
The Review of Revision
Coordinator's Final Report to Authors (meta-review)
Remaining Formatting and Reference Issues
Report completed
----------------------------------------------------------------
2AC review
score 4/5
Confidence
Somewhat confident
First Round Overall Recommendation
Probably acceptable (with minor modifications)
Contribution and Criteria for Evaluation
This paper presents a mixed-methods study comparing two network
hospitality sites:
AirBnB and Couchsurfing. A grounded theory approach was used to
initially analyse
qualitative data from an interview study with 17 participants who
associated with
both sites. This was followed by a quantitative study of the site data
to explore
the main themes that emerged. One of the main findings from the study
relates to
differences in power dependence for the monetary-based site (AirBnB -
empowering
guests) compared to the social-based site (Couchsurfing - empowering
the hosts).
First Round Review
This paper presents a mixed-methods study comparing two network
hospitality sites:
AirBnB and Couchsurfing. A grounded theory approach was used to
initially analyse
qualitative data from an interview study with 17 participants who
associated with
both sites. This was followed by a quantitative study of the site data
to explore
the main themes that emerged. One of the main findings from the study
relates to
differences in power dependence for the monetary-based site (AirBnB -
empowering
guests) compared to the social-based site (Couchsurfing - empowering
the hosts).
This is a well-written paper covering a social computing topic of
relevance to
CSCW. A good account of background work on network hospitality and
sharing economy
is provided to hep contextualise to work.
The themes emerging from the grounded theory analysis are clearly
presented and
interesting, if a little obvious (in terms of what you might
hypothesise given a
description of each site).
The quantitative analysis complements the qualitative study, and it’s
nice to see
an attempt to use in-depth qualitative data and large-scale
quantitative data as
part of the same contribution. I found theme 2 and 3 to be more
convincing in this
respect because I wondered, with theme 1, if there might be wealthy city
/desirable-place-to-visit effect here.
Overall, I think this paper makes a significant contribution to a topic
that fits
within the remit of CSCW and I would argue for accepting it.
Author Response
The Review of Revision
Remaining Formatting and Reference Issues
Report completed
----------------------------------------------------------------
reviewer 1 review
score 4/5
Confidence
Confident
First Round Overall Recommendation
Probably acceptable (with minor modifications)
Contribution and Criteria for Evaluation
The contribution of this paper is in providing an empirical study on the
difference in guest and host relationships between Couchsurfing and
Airbnb. The
authors conducted a mixed-methods study to uncover themes from
interviews and then
support their findings with a quantitative evaluation. The evaluation
criteria for
this type of contribution will be in the validity of the methods used
to arrive at
the conclusions drawn and the impact of the findings.
First Round Review
While the findings of this paper are not necessarily surprising, the
authors show
a thoughtful approach to answering their research question of how
Couchsurfing and
Airbnb’s services differ in regards to guest and host relationships.
Comparisons
between the two hospitality services are not new, as the paper covers
in the
Related Work section. Despite the fact that other papers have sought to
understand
how monetizing changes the interactions on the platform, this is a
great paper
that expands understanding in this relevant and popular area of
research.
The writing is clear and effective; even though multiple methods and
complex
themes are covered, the authors made it easy to follow. What impressed
me most
about this paper was the variety of methods used, and the rigor with
which each
method was approached. The authors used data scraping and linear
regression,
linguistic analysis of reviews, and Mechanical Turk sentiment analysis
to
complement their interviews. They manage to adequately describes the
details of
how these methods were implemented, from interview participant
demographics to the
coding process to their data scraping methodology.
As the authors acknowledge in their Limitations, the themes were
necessarily
operationalized to be able to find quantitative support, but I do not
think this
lessens the impact of their findings. They are careful in the
conclusions that can
be drawn, including the limitations of a correlational study and
self-selection
bias of interview participants, but they do arrive at an impactful
implication
that a shift towards money-based systems as they observed would make
sharing
economies more consumer-oriented. I also commend the authors on their
openness to
share their data with other researchers while maintaining the privacy
of the
users.
A few other points:
- After reading the paper, I was confused about the title. “Cool air
breezing off
the surf” sounds like it’s from a description of a posting on Airbnb or
Couchsurfing but I didn’t notice a reference to the title in the paper.
- The social obligation section was reminiscent of indebtedness
described in a
CSCW paper that might be relevant to cite (Airi Lampinen, Vilma
Lehtinen, Coye
Cheshire, and Emmi Suhonen. 2013. Indebtedness and reciprocity in local
online
exchange. In Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported
cooperative
work (CSCW '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 661-672.
DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2441776.2441850). Similarly, the
discussion of trust
is related to a previous paper on reciprocity in generalized exchange
(Linda D
Molm, Jessica L Collett, and David R Schaefer. 2007. Building
solidarity through
generalized exchange: A theory of Reciprocity. Amer. J. Sociology 113,
1 (2007),
205–242.).
- I’m not sure that Uber is the most apt comparison in the
Generalization section
since users are not able to choose their Uber driver, rather they’re
automatically
assigned one. Perhaps considering how a system that assigns rather than
allows
users to choose might affect the social power would be an interesting
discussion
point.
- Were the dual users currently active on both platforms, or did they
only need to
have experience with both? I wonder if some had switched from one to
the other if
it would bias their responses in any systematic way.
- The last paragraph of page 2 is missing an “is” in the first sentence.
Author Response
The Review of Revision
Remaining Formatting and Reference Issues
----------------------------------------------------------------
reviewer 2 review
score 3/5
Confidence
Very confident
First Round Overall Recommendation
Maybe acceptable (with significant modifications)
Contribution and Criteria for Evaluation
In this paper, the authors focus on two hospitality platforms, namely
Airbnb and
Couchsurfing. In particular, they aim to explore the role of monetary
incentives
(and subsequent framing) in users’ motives and type of relationships
using these
two conceptually different sharing platforms using qualitative and
quantitative
analysis.
First Round Review
Question 1: How important and interesting is the contribution of the
paper to the
CSCW audience?
I find that the paper provides the audience with some interesting
findings about
two hospitality platforms, although not all of them are consistent.
The theoretical positioning could be significantly improved since
theoretical or
practical contribution of this work is unclear. I guess it would be
better if the
authors first formulate the research question and develop the framework
on a more
general level and then present the empirical analysis as a
hypotheses-testing
approach.
Question 2: How well-executed or technically-sound is the paper?
The papers seems to be well-executed technically, the author apply both
quantitative and qualitative analysis. However, the paper suffers from
reporting
problems. As such, it is not specified during what period that data has
been
collected from Airbnb and Couchsurfing. Then, describing the data
cleaning
process, “Of the remaining 9.6% of hosts, we inspected the top 20
cities by host-
count and found that they were all small cities in which no hosts of
the other
platform were listed”, it is not clear what has been done with the
data: was it
excluded from the sample?
Question: Is the length of the submission appropriate for the level of
contribution? Is the paper written clearly to communicate the work to
colleagues
in the field?
I believe the length of the paper is appropriate. The structure of the
work and
the writing style could be, however, improved to make it more
"academic" and less
colloquial at some places. The paper will benefit from proofreading to
fix some
grammar mistakes or typos and to make the narrative typical for the
academic
research.
Below I provide a more detailed summary of my concerns (some of them
have already
been mentioned above). Indeed: Despite an interesting and topical
research goal,
this paper suffers from several concerns.
1) MAJOR: The theoretical part of the paper (“Related Work”) can be
strengthened by including more past research and deriving hypotheses
from the
literature analysis. As such, the paper misses sound theoretical
framing and
especially the quantitative part seems to be somewhat "haphazard". The
authors
briefly mention that both platforms represent Sharing Economy, however,
they do
not position the platform within it, somewhat omitting the past
research on
Sharing Economy. In the “Related work” section the authors argue for
certain
differences that they assume to exist between the platforms but they do
not
present a research scheme or formulate hypotheses out of this.
2) Sometimes references are missing. For example, here a reference
could have
been provided: “Not only are Couchsurfing and Airbnb the two most
widely used
platforms for network hospitality”
3) On page 2, it is stated that: “Extending this analysis to
Airbnb, market-
based systems have now found their own ways to reduce the transaction
costs of
hosting strangers.” Please specify, which ways exactly.
4) In the description of methodology, some information is not
reported, e.g.
when did the interviews take place? when did the data collection take
place? I
believe this is important because the platforms constantly undergo
changes.
5) The authors should probably control for the type of property
which was
rented since it may affect the results. As such, renting a room/couch
with Airbnb
implies much more interaction and therefore is much more comparable to
Couchsurfing in contrast to the case when the whole apartment is rented
out with
Airbnb. On Couchsurfing I guess it is not typical to rent out the whole
property,
so a guest stays always together with the host. This is my main concern
about the
reliability of findings. So, I would probably go for analysis of the
offers that
are initially comparable thus limiting the analysis to the shared
property only.
6) The authors conclude “we heard that Airbnb, but not
Couchsurfing will
create standards for host’s homes. We supported this theme by showing
that the
rate of Airbnb hosts increases with the median house price of a city,
whereas with
Couchsurfing it decreases”. It is necessarily clear how it is related
to the
standards - alternative explanations are possible. The logic appears to
be sound:
the more expensive the property a person has, the more incentives they
have to
rent it out for money and not for free. All in all, exploratory
quantitative data
analysis for Theme 1 seems to be the weakest part of the paper.
7) Another conclusion: “In a closing analysis of user sign-ups we
presented
evidence that Airbnb has grown rapidly relative to Couchsurfing.”
Please explore
implications of this result in greater depth.
8) Finally, as already mentioned, the paper will benefit from
proofreading to
make the style of the narrative typical for the academic literature. In
many cases
the paper sounds somewhat colloquial.
I hope these remarks will help to improve the paper and wish the
authors good luck
with their research!
Author Response
The Review of Revision
Remaining Formatting and Reference Issues
----------------------------------------------------------------

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Congratulations all -- online first.
I should be able to manage the remaining issues and tuck this into bed.
However I'm just a bit confused on these last two content points by R2,
which the meta-review asks me to address:
The following issues remain.
1) The research question is still narrowed only on 2 platforms
which
questions the theoretical and practical contribution. It would be
better if the
framework includes certain type of platforms, e.g. money-based and
non-money-based
as it is done on page 2.
I don't understand exactly what this is asking for since we don't provide
specific RQ's?
3) These comments from the First Round Revision about the
Conclusion Section
were ignored:
• The authors conclude “we heard that Airbnb, but not
Couchsurfing will
create standards for host’s homes We supported this theme by showing
that the rate
of Airbnb hosts increases with the median house price of a city,
whereas with
Couchsurfing it decreases”. I do not understand how it is related to the
standards. For me it seems sound: the more expensive property a person
has, the
more incentives they have to rent it out for money and not for free.
We address this in limitations. I'm not sure what else to do?
• Another conclusion: “In a closing analysis of user sign-ups we
presented
evidence that Airbnb has grown rapidly relative to Couchsurfing.” Can
we say that
when presented with the opportunity people switch to money-rewarding
platform
because they are not so altruistic? Or what implication can we derive?
Are they asking us to speculate? We do that with alternate theories in
"reasons for the shift". Do I just throw that back at the AC?
Make a great day,
Max Klein ‽ http://notconfusing.com/
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Karrie Karahalios, Geraldine Fitzpatrick, and Andrés Monroy-Hernández
<cscw18a@precisionconference.com>
Date: Mon, Aug 7, 2017 at 10:04 PM
Subject: Maximilian Klein, good news about your CSCW paper 1148
To: Maximilian Klein <isalix@gmail.com>
Dear Maximilian Klein -
We are pleased to inform you that your paper:
1148 - Cool air breezing off the surf: Power dependence and standards in
Airbnb and Couchsurfing
has been conditionally accepted to CSCW 2018 Online First. Congratulations!
This year we received 384 submissions, of which 105 have been accepted for
presentation at the conference.
CONTENT
We are writing to provide your second round reviews, and to give you
important information related to submitting your camera-ready paper and
presenting it at the conference.
First, your reviews are provided below. Please read these carefully. For
full acceptance, make sure your final submission of the camera-ready paper
makes the changes suggested by the AC in their meta review. If the AC finds
their concerns have been adequately addressed, the paper will be accepted.
In a few cases, the AC or a designated Program Committee (PC) member
will help shepherd your paper. Please arrange to meet with them immediately
as this may take several rounds of discourse. If these changes are not met
by the camera-ready deadline, the paper will not be published. The AC or PC
member will let you know if your paper is in this category. If in doubt,
you can also contact us.
FORMAT
Note that because CSCW is moving to The Proceedings of the ACM (PACM) from
this point forward, the format has changed! If you have not already
transferred your paper to the new one-column format, please use the
ACM-small template here:
https://www.acm.org/publications/authors/submissions
For any questions regarding the new format, please contact:
support@cscw2018.freshdesk.com
Your next step is to prepare your camera-ready paper, which must be
submitted into the PCS system by September 6, 2017. You will also be
contacted by Sheridan Publishing, or directly by us, with specific
information about producing an appropriate PDF, choosing among ACM
copyright and license options, etc. Please pay special attention to the
citation format used by CSCW (e.g., author’s first name spelled out first,
but sorted by family name). All papers must be submitted in camera-ready
form to be included in the conference program.
Papers from CSCW 2018 Online first will appear in late 2017 in the
Proceedings of the ACM : Human-Computer Interaction: Volume 1: Issue 1:
Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing 2017. This will be
the inaugural issue of the PACM. They will be archived in the ACM Digital
Library and will be free for download for up to two years after publication.
CONFERENCE
All papers accepted for CSCW 2018 from either the Online First or
subsequent CSCW 2018 Spring deadline will have presentation slots at CSCW
2018, presented by at least one of the authors. The presentation format may
differ for Online First papers but is guaranteed to include some form of
oral presentation at the conference.
If your work involves an innovative system that would be appropriate to
demonstrate, we'd like to encourage you to submit a demonstration to CSCW
2018 Spring as well. Deadline information will be available at:
https://cscw.acm.org/2018/
Finally, note that it is still possible to participate in the CSCW 2018
Spring paper submission cycle and other CSCW 2018 venues such as papers,
posters, panels, demonstrations, workshops, and the doctoral consortium.
Deadlines for papers, posters, demonstrations, workshops, and the doctoral
consortium will be available at: https://cscw.acm.org/2018/
Again, congratulations! Thank you for submitting your work to CSCW 2018 and
we look forward to seeing you overlooking the Hudson River in Jersey City
in 2018!
Geraldine Fitzpatrick
Karrie Karahalios
Andres Monroy-Hernandez
CSCW 2018 Online First Papers Chairs
----------------------------------------------------------------
AC review
score 4/5
Confidence
Confident
First Round Overall Recommendation
4 - Probably acceptable (with minor modifications)
SECOND ROUND Overall Recommendation
4 - Probably acceptable (with minor modifications)
Contribution and Criteria for Evaluation
First Round Review from AC (if needed)
Coordinator's First-Round Report to Authors
This paper comparing AirBNB and Couchsurfing was well-received by
reviewers, who
thought it was well-written and used a strong multi-methodological
approach to
study differences in guest-host relationships.The authors also agree
this study is
a good fit with the CSCW community.
Please carefully read through the reviewers' comments to address the
questions and
suggestions. For example, R1 raises a good point about comparing these
sites to
Uber because of the agency (or lack thereof) in choosing one's "host."
R2 was most critical of the paper, and provides a number of suggestions
related to
the theoretical framing and the authors' interpretation of the data.
Finally, one aspect on which these papers are judged is whether the
contribution
matches the length. The paper is on the long side, although perhaps
that is
justified, especially with the tables/figures, but I was disappointed
in the
length of the discussion. I don't know exactly how the authors could
address this
without adding length, but I definitely want to see a more explicit
discussion of
how this paper extends our existing knowledge around the sharing
economy.
Requested Revisions
See above.
Formatting and Reference Issues
R2 notes (and I agree) that the paper should be revised to read more
academic and
less colloquial.
The reviewers also point to related work on the sharing economy,
including
research by Airi Lampinen (who publishes at CSCW).
Finally, the reviewers noted some grammatical issues, and R1 was
confused by the
paper's title.
Author Response
The Review of Revision
Coordinator's Final Report to Authors (meta-review)
Dear authors,
The reviewers have read your revised paper and summary of changes and
have agreed
the paper should be accepted to CSCW 2018 (online first). As noted in
the
reviewers' individual comments, there is agreement that this paper is
relevant to
CSCW, well-written, and interesting. Furthermore, the revisions made
during the
R&R period further strengthened the paper and the consensus is that it
should be
accepted.
When finalizing the paper for publication, please make sure that R2's
concerns
have been addressed. I believe the generalization problem has been
sufficiently
addressed, although if the authors could consider additional ways to
discuss the
aspects of this research that extend to other parts of the sharing
economy.
Remaining Formatting and Reference Issues
Report completed
Completed
----------------------------------------------------------------
2AC review
score 4/5
Confidence
Somewhat confident
First Round Overall Recommendation
4 - Probably acceptable (with minor modifications)
SECOND ROUND Overall Recommendation
4 - Probably acceptable (with minor modifications)
Contribution and Criteria for Evaluation
This paper presents a mixed-methods study comparing two network
hospitality sites:
AirBnB and Couchsurfing. A grounded theory approach was used to
initially analyse
qualitative data from an interview study with 17 participants who
associated with
both sites. This was followed by a quantitative study of the site data
to explore
the main themes that emerged. One of the main findings from the study
relates to
differences in power dependence for the monetary-based site (AirBnB -
empowering
guests) compared to the social-based site (Couchsurfing - empowering
the hosts).
First Round Review
This paper presents a mixed-methods study comparing two network
hospitality sites:
AirBnB and Couchsurfing. A grounded theory approach was used to
initially analyse
qualitative data from an interview study with 17 participants who
associated with
both sites. This was followed by a quantitative study of the site data
to explore
the main themes that emerged. One of the main findings from the study
relates to
differences in power dependence for the monetary-based site (AirBnB -
empowering
guests) compared to the social-based site (Couchsurfing - empowering
the hosts).
This is a well-written paper covering a social computing topic of
relevance to
CSCW. A good account of background work on network hospitality and
sharing economy
is provided to hep contextualise to work.
The themes emerging from the grounded theory analysis are clearly
presented and
interesting, if a little obvious (in terms of what you might
hypothesise given a
description of each site).
The quantitative analysis complements the qualitative study, and it’s
nice to see
an attempt to use in-depth qualitative data and large-scale
quantitative data as
part of the same contribution. I found theme 2 and 3 to be more
convincing in this
respect because I wondered, with theme 1, if there might be wealthy city
/desirable-place-to-visit effect here.
Overall, I think this paper makes a significant contribution to a topic
that fits
within the remit of CSCW and I would argue for accepting it.
Author Response
Most or all of my comments were addressed.
The Review of Revision
I originally argued for accepting this paper and I think the changes
the authors
made have further strengthened it. I think it will certainly be of
interest to the
CSCW community and I feel the level of contribution is appropriate for
the venue.
Remaining Formatting and Reference Issues
Report completed
Completed
----------------------------------------------------------------
reviewer 1 review
score 5/5
Confidence
Confident
First Round Overall Recommendation
5 - Definitely acceptable (ready as-is)
SECOND ROUND Overall Recommendation
5 - Definitely acceptable (ready as-is)
Contribution and Criteria for Evaluation
The contribution of this paper is in providing an empirical study on the
difference in guest and host relationships between Couchsurfing and
Airbnb. The
authors conducted a mixed-methods study to uncover themes from
interviews and then
support their findings with a quantitative evaluation. The evaluation
criteria for
this type of contribution will be in the validity of the methods used
to arrive at
the conclusions drawn and the impact of the findings.
First Round Review
While the findings of this paper are not necessarily surprising, the
authors show
a thoughtful approach to answering their research question of how
Couchsurfing and
Airbnb’s services differ in regards to guest and host relationships.
Comparisons
between the two hospitality services are not new, as the paper covers
in the
Related Work section. Despite the fact that other papers have sought to
understand
how monetizing changes the interactions on the platform, this is a
great paper
that expands understanding in this relevant and popular area of
research.
The writing is clear and effective; even though multiple methods and
complex
themes are covered, the authors made it easy to follow. What impressed
me most
about this paper was the variety of methods used, and the rigor with
which each
method was approached. The authors used data scraping and linear
regression,
linguistic analysis of reviews, and Mechanical Turk sentiment analysis
to
complement their interviews. They manage to adequately describes the
details of
how these methods were implemented, from interview participant
demographics to the
coding process to their data scraping methodology.
As the authors acknowledge in their Limitations, the themes were
necessarily
operationalized to be able to find quantitative support, but I do not
think this
lessens the impact of their findings. They are careful in the
conclusions that can
be drawn, including the limitations of a correlational study and
self-selection
bias of interview participants, but they do arrive at an impactful
implication
that a shift towards money-based systems as they observed would make
sharing
economies more consumer-oriented. I also commend the authors on their
openness to
share their data with other researchers while maintaining the privacy
of the
users.
A few other points:
- After reading the paper, I was confused about the title. “Cool air
breezing off
the surf” sounds like it’s from a description of a posting on Airbnb or
Couchsurfing but I didn’t notice a reference to the title in the paper.
- The social obligation section was reminiscent of indebtedness
described in a
CSCW paper that might be relevant to cite (Airi Lampinen, Vilma
Lehtinen, Coye
Cheshire, and Emmi Suhonen. 2013. Indebtedness and reciprocity in local
online
exchange. In Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported
cooperative
work (CSCW '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 661-672.
DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2441776.2441850). Similarly, the
discussion of trust
is related to a previous paper on reciprocity in generalized exchange
(Linda D
Molm, Jessica L Collett, and David R Schaefer. 2007. Building
solidarity through
generalized exchange: A theory of Reciprocity. Amer. J. Sociology 113,
1 (2007),
205–242.).
- I’m not sure that Uber is the most apt comparison in the
Generalization section
since users are not able to choose their Uber driver, rather they’re
automatically
assigned one. Perhaps considering how a system that assigns rather than
allows
users to choose might affect the social power would be an interesting
discussion
point.
- Were the dual users currently active on both platforms, or did they
only need to
have experience with both? I wonder if some had switched from one to
the other if
it would bias their responses in any systematic way.
- The last paragraph of page 2 is missing an “is” in the first sentence.
Author Response
Most or all of my comments were addressed.
The Review of Revision
The authors adequately addressed the feedback that I provided. They
included the
suggested references, changed the generalization example away from
Uber, and
updated the title. I felt that this was a strong paper in the initial
round, and
with the changes, the paper has improved. I think it is a well-written,
thoughtful
and thorough paper that would be of interest and contribute to the CSCW
community.
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reviewer 2 review
score 3/5
Confidence
Very confident
First Round Overall Recommendation
3 - Maybe acceptable (with significant modifications)
SECOND ROUND Overall Recommendation
3 - Maybe acceptable (with significant modifications)
Contribution and Criteria for Evaluation
In this paper, the authors focus on two hospitality platforms, namely
Airbnb and
Couchsurfing. In particular, they aim to explore the role of monetary
incentives
(and subsequent framing) in users’ motives and type of relationships
using these
two conceptually different sharing platforms using qualitative and
quantitative
analysis.
First Round Review
Question 1: How important and interesting is the contribution of the
paper to the
CSCW audience?
I find that the paper provides the audience with some interesting
findings about
two hospitality platforms, although not all of them are consistent.
The theoretical positioning could be significantly improved since
theoretical or
practical contribution of this work is unclear. I guess it would be
better if the
authors first formulate the research question and develop the framework
on a more
general level and then present the empirical analysis as a
hypotheses-testing
approach.
Question 2: How well-executed or technically-sound is the paper?
The papers seems to be well-executed technically, the author apply both
quantitative and qualitative analysis. However, the paper suffers from
reporting
problems. As such, it is not specified during what period that data has
been
collected from Airbnb and Couchsurfing. Then, describing the data
cleaning
process, “Of the remaining 9.6% of hosts, we inspected the top 20
cities by host-
count and found that they were all small cities in which no hosts of
the other
platform were listed”, it is not clear what has been done with the
data: was it
excluded from the sample?
Question: Is the length of the submission appropriate for the level of
contribution? Is the paper written clearly to communicate the work to
colleagues
in the field?
I believe the length of the paper is appropriate. The structure of the
work and
the writing style could be, however, improved to make it more
"academic" and less
colloquial at some places. The paper will benefit from proofreading to
fix some
grammar mistakes or typos and to make the narrative typical for the
academic
research.
Below I provide a more detailed summary of my concerns (some of them
have already
been mentioned above). Indeed: Despite an interesting and topical
research goal,
this paper suffers from several concerns.
1) MAJOR: The theoretical part of the paper (“Related Work”) can be
strengthened by including more past research and deriving hypotheses
from the
literature analysis. As such, the paper misses sound theoretical
framing and
especially the quantitative part seems to be somewhat "haphazard". The
authors
briefly mention that both platforms represent Sharing Economy, however,
they do
not position the platform within it, somewhat omitting the past
research on
Sharing Economy. In the “Related work” section the authors argue for
certain
differences that they assume to exist between the platforms but they do
not
present a research scheme or formulate hypotheses out of this.
2) Sometimes references are missing. For example, here a reference
could have
been provided: “Not only are Couchsurfing and Airbnb the two most
widely used
platforms for network hospitality”
3) On page 2, it is stated that: “Extending this analysis to
Airbnb, market-
based systems have now found their own ways to reduce the transaction
costs of
hosting strangers.” Please specify, which ways exactly.
4) In the description of methodology, some information is not
reported, e.g.
when did the interviews take place? when did the data collection take
place? I
believe this is important because the platforms constantly undergo
changes.
5) The authors should probably control for the type of property
which was
rented since it may affect the results. As such, renting a room/couch
with Airbnb
implies much more interaction and therefore is much more comparable to
Couchsurfing in contrast to the case when the whole apartment is rented
out with
Airbnb. On Couchsurfing I guess it is not typical to rent out the whole
property,
so a guest stays always together with the host. This is my main concern
about the
reliability of findings. So, I would probably go for analysis of the
offers that
are initially comparable thus limiting the analysis to the shared
property only.
6) The authors conclude “we heard that Airbnb, but not
Couchsurfing will
create standards for host’s homes. We supported this theme by showing
that the
rate of Airbnb hosts increases with the median house price of a city,
whereas with
Couchsurfing it decreases”. It is necessarily clear how it is related
to the
standards - alternative explanations are possible. The logic appears to
be sound:
the more expensive the property a person has, the more incentives they
have to
rent it out for money and not for free. All in all, exploratory
quantitative data
analysis for Theme 1 seems to be the weakest part of the paper.
7) Another conclusion: “In a closing analysis of user sign-ups we
presented
evidence that Airbnb has grown rapidly relative to Couchsurfing.”
Please explore
implications of this result in greater depth.
8) Finally, as already mentioned, the paper will benefit from
proofreading to
make the style of the narrative typical for the academic literature. In
many cases
the paper sounds somewhat colloquial.
I hope these remarks will help to improve the paper and wish the
authors good luck
with their research!
Author Response
Some of my comments were addressed.
The Review of Revision
In the revised version, the authors improved the writing style and
fixed some
typos.
The following issues remain.
1) The research question is still narrowed only on 2 platforms
which
questions the theoretical and practical contribution. It would be
better if the
framework includes certain type of platforms, e.g. money-based and
non-money-based
as it is done on page 2.
2) Providing the definition of the sharing economy, the speech
transcript of
Rachel Botsman in French is cited, although the speech itself was held
in English.
Therefore, it is not possible to check it. Moreover, it is not an
academic source
and not the most reliable one.
3) These comments from the First Round Revision about the
Conclusion Section
were ignored:
• The authors conclude “we heard that Airbnb, but not
Couchsurfing will
create standards for host’s homes We supported this theme by showing
that the rate
of Airbnb hosts increases with the median house price of a city,
whereas with
Couchsurfing it decreases”. I do not understand how it is related to the
standards. For me it seems sound: the more expensive property a person
has, the
more incentives they have to rent it out for money and not for free.
• Another conclusion: “In a closing analysis of user sign-ups we
presented
evidence that Airbnb has grown rapidly relative to Couchsurfing.” Can
we say that
when presented with the opportunity people switch to money-rewarding
platform
because they are not so altruistic? Or what implication can we derive?
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