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Neutrality may matter: sentiment analysis in reviews of Airbnb, Booking, and Couchsurfing in Brazil and USA

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Abstract

Information and communications technologies have enabled the rise of the phenomenon named sharing economy, which represents activities between people, coordinated by online platforms, to obtain, provide, or share access to goods and services. In hosting services of the sharing economy, it is common to have a personal contact between the host and guest, and this may affect users’ decision to do negative reviews, as negative reviews can damage the offered services. To evaluate this issue, we collected reviews from two sharing economy platforms, Airbnb and Couchsurfing, and from one platform that works mostly with hotels (traditional economy), Booking.com, for some cities in Brazil and the USA. Through a sentiment analysis, we found that reviews in the sharing economy tend to be considerably more positive than those in the traditional economy. This can represent a problem in those systems, as an experiment with volunteers performed in this study suggests. In addition, we discuss how to exploit the results obtained to help improve users’ decision making.

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Notes

  1. http://www.uber.com.

  2. https://www.cabify.com.

  3. https://www.airbnb.com.

  4. https://www.couchsurfing.com.

  5. https://www.booking.com.

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Acknowledgements

This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES) - Finance Code 001. This work is also partially supported by the project URBCOMP (Grant #403260 /2016-7 from National Council for Scientific and Technological Development agency - CNPq) and GoodWeb (Grant #2018/23011-1 from Sao Paulo Research Foundation - FAPESP). The authors would also like to thank Marcelo Santos and all the volunteers for the valuable help in this study.

Funding

Grants that supported this study: CAPES - Finance Code 001, CNPq Grant #403260/2016-7, FAPESP GoodWEB Project Grant #2018/23011-1.

Author information

Author notes

  1. Thiago H. Silva

    Present address: University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidade Tecnólogica Federal do Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil

    Gustavo Santos & Thiago H. Silva

  2. Universidade Federal do Espirito Santo, Vitória, Brazil

    Vinicius F. S. Mota

  3. Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil

    Fabrício Benevenuto

Authors
  1. Gustavo Santos
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  2. Vinicius F. S. Mota
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  3. Fabrício Benevenuto
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  4. Thiago H. Silva
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Correspondence to Thiago H. Silva.

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Appendices

Appendix 1: Topics of negative comments in Portuguese

This section presents the topic analysis for negative reviews written in Portuguese, following the same methodology presented in Sect. 5.5. The results in Table 6 follow a similar pattern to the one observed English reviews.

Table 6 Ten latent topics from negative comments written in English shared on Booking and Airbnb
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Appendix 2: Simulation of score

Table 7 shows some examples of score based on reviews and polarity of Airbnb. This helps us to have an idea on how each variable impacted score. In these examples, the score values ranged from 5.09 (worst score) to 64.69 (best score).

Table 7 Examples of score based on reviews and polarity of Airbnb
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Santos, G., Mota, V.F.S., Benevenuto, F. et al. Neutrality may matter: sentiment analysis in reviews of Airbnb, Booking, and Couchsurfing in Brazil and USA. Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. 10, 45 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-020-00656-5

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