First impressions on sharing accommodation market platforms: The association between cover image type and property listing price

Shared accommodation platforms, including Airbnb, encourage hosts to post images of rentals. In this study, a hedonic pricing model was developed to test the effects of different cover image scenes (indoor or outdoor) on Airbnb listing prices and to test how strongly the effects were moderated by images’ visual aesthetics or room type. The model was estimated using a dataset of 24,162 Airbnb listings in Beijing, China, from October 2020. Empirical results revealed that 1) compared with Airbnb properties whose cover images showed indoor scenes, properties whose cover images showed outdoor scenes tended to have higher prices; and 2) cover images’ visual aesthetics and room type each significantly moderated the association between cover images and property listing prices. This study is one of the earliest to assess the roles of properties’ cover images in the shared accommodation market. The interaction effects of image scenes and other factors related to cover images were also explored for the first time.