A population survey finds booking-app guests and hosts read the same response-rate percentage as three different things, at trust thresholds far apart.
A School of Emergent Priorities population survey of 1,412 guests and hosts finds no shared reading of the number, and no shared threshold for trusting it
A survey led by the School of Emergent Priorities has found that booking-app guests and hosts do not agree on what a host’s published response-rate percentage is meant to certify, despite treating the figure as an established fact of the platform. Surveying 1,412 users across account tenure and booking frequency, the study finds the badge read as a measure of reply speed, of acceptance certainty, or of general reliability in roughly equal measure, with no single reading dominant in any group tested.
We didn’t set out to find disagreement; we set out to check whether guests and hosts were disagreeing about the same thing without realising it, and it turns out they were.
— Dr Ronja Oyelaran, Senior Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The study also asked respondents the lowest response-rate percentage at which they would still book, and found the answer varies widely enough that a single published cutoff sits above some respondents’ stated threshold and below others’, all reading the same number. Co-author Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist said the result sits alongside a run of School findings on how quickly an institution can standardise around a figure nobody has stress-tested for shared meaning. The finding extends the School’s long-running interest in the small print of everyday trust, and adds a population-scale instrument to an agenda that keeps turning up numbers nobody thought to compare notes on.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ajqiov.