Reviews · Empirical analysis joining Airbnb reviews with official crime data in five cities; counterfactual simulations of review visibility.
Safety Reviews on Airbnb: An Information Tale
Marketing Science · 2025
Summary
Safety reviews and personal safety experiences reduced bookings; removing vicinity-safety reviews could increase Airbnb reservation revenue under unchanged beliefs, but highlighting/removing effects reverse under rational updating; review–crime correlation is stronger in low-income/minority neighborhoods.
For your marketing
Possible founder application
Use it as a behavioral mechanism or experiment-design reference, not a direct forecast for a SaaS funnel.
Reported result
What the study found
Safety reviews and personal safety experiences reduced bookings; removing vicinity-safety reviews could increase Airbnb reservation revenue under unchanged beliefs, but highlighting/removing effects reverse under rational updating; review–crime correlation is stronger in low-income/minority neighborhoods.
Research question
What the authors investigated
How does visibility of vicinity-safety reviews affect bookings, revenue and neighborhood sorting?
Design
Empirical analysis joining Airbnb reviews with official crime data in five cities; counterfactual simulations of review visibility.
Sample and setting
Airbnb listings/reviews and official crime data in five major U.S. cities.
Scope and transfer
Limitations to keep in view
Evidence is limited to five major U.S. cities and model-based counterfactuals; the publisher reports conditional outcomes depending on belief updating and learning.
Research sources
Publisher abstract states the five-city Airbnb/crime-data merge and conditional counterfactual results. Direct publisher-page retrieval was recorded on 2026-10-09; this profile uses publisher metadata/abstract and does not claim independent review of unavailable full text.