How platforms like Airbnb turn users into narcissistic entrepreneurs

• When browsing Airbnb listings for a weekend getaway, you would not only check cottage amenities but also scroll through previous guest reviews.
• And if you put up your house for rental on the same platform, you would scrutinise prospective guests beforehand.

Controlling online transactions between strangers

• After all, there is no way online platforms such as Airbnb, Turo or Uber (the so-called sharing economy) can control each and every transaction.
• This is why, to maintain trust in their platforms, they decentralise control to users.

Airbnb: a “netnography”

• And what we found wasn’t a happy, touchy-feely “community” (the official Airbnb term for its collective of users) engaging in the so-called sharing economy.
• Peer-to-peer platforms provide users with a structure to assetise and maximise the value of private belongings and skills on marketplaces.
• The public, overwhelmingly positive, evaluation system extends the mere review process and encompasses profile setting, and photos’ posting for instance.

The rise of narcissistic entrepreneurs

• This embodies transactions and anchors the use of the platform to a seemingly virtual community.
• So in a subtle way, the object of the evaluation shifts from the service to the user’s own worth.
• Still, the comments are outwardly positive, but users place subtle hints that can alert the rest of the community, without the risk of appearing overcritical.

How Airbnb reproduces class biases

• We conclude that reviews are material to make sense of the self and an opportunity to show an ideal projection of the self.
• Digging deeper into the subtleties of the process, we explain that users also make sense of themselves through the fellow users they select by decoding weak signals in reviews.
• As a guest, Violet explained that when selecting accommodation, she seeks a comparable neighbourhood to her own.

Blatant discrimination

• In stark contrast to this appearance of tolerance, many users exclude others based on racist or sexist considerations.
• They end up discriminating more or less consciously based on social, racial or class grounds (spelling errors, racial stereotypes, perception of a guest’s home city as crime-ridden, etc.).
• Behind the facade of community, online evaluation processes push users into schemes of social reproduction.

Cheap and optimal control

• Therefore, compared to evaluation in a corporate context, evaluation on peer-to-peer platforms guarantees cheap and optimal control.
• It is decentralised to users, and builds on reciprocity and narcissism so as to secure the fluidity of transactions without fuelling competition between users.