A Study On The Influence Of Psychological Distance On The Booking Behavior Of Guests In Shared Accommodation Platforms

In the past decade,the sharing economy has been rising rapidly.Among them,shared accommodation as one of the sharing economy transaction models has become more and more popular among consumers.Shared accommodation platforms have become an important way to attract consumers to participate in shared accommodation,and many hotels and guesthouses are participating in shared accommodation platforms,which have become an effective way to compete with the traditional hospitality industry.In shared accommodation platforms,the main concern of hosts is how to attract consumers’ attention through the information displayed on the platform,thus increasing the number of room bookings.Based on the construal level theory,this paper explores how the psychological distance that guests perceive from the information displayed by hosts on shared accommodation platforms affects the booking behavior of guests.Based on a data-driven behavioral decision-making approach,this paper uses a Python crawler program to collect actual consumption data of online listings in Beijing and Shanghai from September 2020 to September 2021 from Airbnb,the world’s leading online shared accommodation platform,and performs data pre-processing on the raw data such as removing vacancy data,removing non-Chinese text,and excluding non-face images,and uses text Theme analysis and face recognition analysis were used to extract and quantify the characterization factors of psychological distance,and the response time and instant bookable represented the temporal distance variables,and theme diversity,perspective selection,facial attractiveness,and photo saturation of the listing represented the social distance,to construct a research model of the influence of psychological distance on the booking behavior of guests.Then the negative binomial regression using regression analysis software Stata15 was used to test the mechanism of the influence of temporal distance and social distance on the booking behavior of guests.The results showed that theme diversity,perspective choice,and facial attractiveness in the social distance dimension had a positive effect on the booking behavior of the guests,and the photo saturation of the room showed a U-shaped relationship with the booking behavior.Instant booking in the temporal distance dimension has a positive effect on booking behavior,while response time has a negative effect on booking behavior.In addition,instant bookable in the time distance had a positive moderating effect on the relationship between social distance and guests’ booking behavior,while response time had a non-significant moderating effect on the relationship between the variables of social distance dimensions and booking behavior.By capturing and analyzing real consumption data,this study empirically examines the mechanism of the effect of psychological distance on the booking behavior of guests in shared accommodation platforms,which not only extends psychological distance to the study of guest booking behavior in shared accommodation,complements the influencing factors of booking behavior,and broadens the application scenarios of psychological distance,but also provides practical inspiration for shared accommodation service providers to increase the number of room bookings and sharing economy platform managers to better.