My home on the platform: Exploring the physical privacy concerns of home-sharing providers

The success of home-sharing platforms like Airbnb has introduced the role of sharing providers, i.e. those users who list their properties on the website and share them in exchange for an income. Different from micro-entrepreneurs within other types of peer-to-peer platforms such as e-marketplaces, the experience of home-sharing often presumes face-to-face interactions and physical sharing of private spaces and goods. For providers, this can give rise to concerns about the integrity of the personal possessions they share ("physical privacy"; Lutz, Hoffmann, Bucher, & Fieseler, 2018). Employing Belk's theory of the Extended Self, which postulates that individuals' owned objects and spaces become part of their identity (1988), and based on a sample of European home-sharing providers, we investigate strategic self-presentation, reputational concerns, and attachment to shared properties as predictors of their physical privacy concerns.