Character is fate: How tourism entrepreneurs’ extraversion and agreeableness affect their market exit in the sharing economy

The rate of market exit of tourism entrepreneurs from sharing economy platforms is surprisingly high, given that the sharing business is flourishing. We argue that the destiny of performance is partly shaped by the tourism entrepreneur's personality, and explore the effect, channel, and interaction of personality traits on exit (vs. operation) with three studies. Based on a dataset comprising monthly information of 138,331 observations involving 21,556 tourism entrepreneurs and a survey experiment, our findings indicate that agreeableness decreases the exit rate whereas extraversion increases it; service quality mediates the impact. Agreeableness benefits from the contextual factor of managerial experience in the tourism industry, while extraversion benefits from restricted use policies. Moreover, extraversion leads to an operational interest trap for survival. This study is the first to unveil the intricate mechanism underlying the impact of personality traits on tourism entrepreneurs' exit and establish a novel construct known as Personality - Exit fate (PEF), which aims to stimulate tourism entrepreneurship in emerging economies.