Causal recipes of customer loyalty in a sharing economy: Integrating social media analytics and fsQCA

Abstract

Built on the evolutionary stimulus-organism-response model, this study examines how customer encounters with different interaction mechanisms (stimuli) evoke service-quality perceptions and sentiments (organisms) that impact customer loyalty (responses) to accommodation-sharing services. It draws important service-quality dimensions and sentiments from Airbnb reviews and examines which patterns lead to the highest levels of customer loyalty. It is the first study to integrate social media analytics and fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis to explain the attitudinal and behavioral components of customer loyalty. A distinctive aspect of the findings is the prescriptive causal recipes that allow hosts to prioritize certain resources, focusing more on the key dimensions (order winners) that most affect customer loyalty. The findings also show that configurations leading to high-level attitudinal loyalty differ from those leading to high-level behavioral loyalty in accommodation sharing.