Duality of Tourists’ Value Co-Creation Behaviors in the Sharing Economy: Longitudinal Insight from Airbnb via Social Media Analytics

Abstract

The intricate relationships between tourists’ value co-creation behaviors and value perception in the sharing economy have attracted increasing attention from researchers and practitioners. Unlike previous studies that focused on such relationships at a particular time point, this study sheds light on the dynamics of tourists’ value co-creation behaviors and employs social media analytics to reveal their longitudinal role in value perception. Our empirical specifications reveal the long-run one-way causality of such relationships, disclose their inverted U-shaped relationships over time, and quantify the boundary thresholds at which value co-creation transforms into value co-destruction. These findings also uncover a significant interaction effect across two value co-creation behavior dimensions, that is, participation behaviors and citizenship behaviors. This study enriches our knowledge of the duality of tourists’ value co-creation behaviors, and offers insights into how to leverage the boundary thresholds of value co-creation behaviors to formulate customized tourism marketing strategies in the sharing economy.