Identifying Users' Concerns in Lodging Sharing Economy Using Unsupervised Machine Learning Approach

Abstract

Lodging sharing economy services have exponentially grown in the last decade. The users of this new economic model are also facing many challenges and difficulties which are less commonly known to the research community. In this research, we have used unique data collection and an unsupervised machine learning method to uncover the needs and concerns of the users of this new economic model. We focused on the lodging company, Airbnb, to use as our test case. Similar approaches can also be applied on other sharing economies companies. The results reported current lodging sharing services lacks regulations for disputes. Findings also revealed safety concerns of the users. Overall, this research contributes with practical managerial implications and guidelines for future research while implementing a new data collection methodology.