Moderating Effect of Trust on Customer Return Intention Formation in Peer-to-Peer Sharing Accommodation

The peer-to-peer sharing accommodation features a high level of asymmetric information and a series of uncertainties and risks. Therefore, trust plays a critical role in shaping consumer behavior. Previous studies have frequently emphasized the direct effect of trust during the prepurchasing stage while disregarding its role in shaping customer satisfaction/return intention at the postpurchasing stage. Based on the attribution theory, in this study, we model the formation of return intention by incorporating the moderating effects of trust. A sample of 500 peer-to-peer sharing accommodation participants in China was collected to test the extended model based on the moderated structural equation modeling. Furthermore, users of Airbnb and Chinese domestic platforms were compared. Results demonstrated the existence of the moderating role of trust for domestic platform users but not for Airbnb users.