The role of deontological morality in shaping demand within the sharing economy

Abstract

This study examines how deontological and consequentialist appeals in Airbnb host self-descriptions relate to trust-related attention and marketplace performance. Study 1 combines a five-city listing panel with third-party New York property-month records; Study 2 analyzes a behavioral highlighting task. In the five-city models, deontology was negatively associated with Expected Demand and Expected Income, but its interactions with deontological sentiment were positive, indicating a framing-dependent pattern. In a six-month New York DID-style pre/post comparison under conditional parallel trends, entropy-balanced ATT weighting indicated 18.6% higher monthly revenue for positive deontological but not positive consequentialist baseline framing relative to neither-positive framing (nominal p = .038). The corresponding ATO estimate was 14.0% for the covariate-overlap population (nominal p = .042), not an independent replication. In Study 2, participants identified trust-eliciting content more often in deontological than consequentialist descriptions; the retained data support differential attention, not a causal effect on trust or booking behavior. The New York estimand concerns a bundled baseline language state, not the effect of editing language; its interpretation is conditional, and neither revenue estimate survived multiplicity adjustment.