The role of superhost badge in Airbnb hosts’ continuance intention

ABSTRACT Based on the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) and the commitment-trust theory, this study examines the antecedents of Airbnb hosts’ continuance intention by integrating TPB with trust towards Airbnb along with the moderating effect of the Superhost badge. A sample of 160 Vietnamese Airbnb hosts was collected through a web-based survey and data were analysed with PLS-SEM. Findings revealed that Airbnb hosts’ attitude, perceived behavioural control and trust towards Airbnb significantly impact their intent to continue sharing on the platform. Furthermore, results also confirmed the existence of the moderating role of Airbnb hosts’ status in their decision-making process. These findings subsequently lead to practical recommendations for the platform management in enhancing Airbnb hosts’ continuance intention during the prevailing disaster.


Introduction
The worldwide society and economy experienced an unprecedented exogenous shock caused by the severe Covid-19 pandemic, which has especially left a substantial effect on the hospitality and tourism industry in general, or the peer-to-peer (P2P) accommodation market in particular (Dolnicar & Zare, 2020).However, crisis management in the tourism industry does intentionally focus on large corporations, while small and medium-sized businesses which are usually known for having a lack of resources, knowledge and experience are more vulnerable to crisis' impact.For these reasons, the P2P accommodation platforms such as Airbnb were claimed as lacking strategic thinking in the COVID-19 pandemic (Carpenter, 2020).More particularly, one of the key users in Airbnb platforms are Airbnb hosts who are considered as being inexperienced in dealing with the ongoing crisis, which leads them to engage in different strategies including service adjustment in the platform (Carville, 2020;Recode Decode, 2020), or listing their accommodation on the long-term rental market (O'sullivan, 2020).According to the AirDNA report (2020), Airbnb has been witnessing a significant loss of a number of hosts as a consequence of failing to provide sufficient support to hosts.Thus, understanding the measures which Airbnb hosts take to deal with the challenges is undoubtedly vital to sustain the sharing accommodation platform throughout the prevailing crisis (La et al., 2021).
Regarding the development of Airbnb in Vietnam, this business model firstly appeared in 2015 with the beginning of over one thousand listings.However, the number of listings fastly reached over 80,000 in early 2020, and later gradually decreased due to the COVID-19 pandemic.Interestingly, the vast majority of the bookings (84%) were from the inbound market, while domestic visitors only accounted for 16% (My My, 2019).The heavy dependence of the business on the international visitors has even more emphasized the negative impact of the pandemic on the operation of Airbnb in Vietnam, since the country closed down the international borders in March 2020 to control the outbreak of the virus.In order to survive during this health-related crisis, many hosts sold out their assets, while other hosts diversified their business strategies such as listing their accommodations in other types of platforms such as Booking.com, or promoting their services to more domestic visitors (Nguyen & Van, 2021).Nevertheless, it is worth noting that there is very little Airbnb-related research conducted in Vietnam.
The Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB), whose central factor is an individual's intention to perform a given behaviour, is commonly used to investigate the antecedents of behaviours (Ajzen, 1991).Previous researchers have applied or extended the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) to understand business leaders' intention to perform a certain behaviour in different contexts.For instance, Huang and Kuo (2020) applied this theory to study the influential factors of people's intention to be first-time asset suppliers in the sharing platform.To investigate the key determinants of accommodation owners/managers' intention to implement crisis planning activities, J. Wang and Ritchie (2012) extended the TPB by adding past crisis experience.This well-known theory has been applied widely and successfully in various research contexts for decades.However, to the best of our knowledge, there is not any prior research applying this theory to study microentrepreneurs, such as Airbnb hosts' business continuity intentions in a global pandemic.Additionally, the commitment-trust theory has also been utilized to study consumers' intentions of participation continuance in the online platforms.Especially in the context of P2P accommodation, the trust of platform users which ultimately enhance their attitude and loyalty intention towards the platform, thus, was confirmed to play a fundamental role in the success of the sharing economy and ensuring the sustainable future of this economy model (e.g.B. Kim & Kim, 2020;Ert et al., 2016).Based on these theoretical backgrounds, the present study will integrate the TPB model with trust towards Airbnb to explore the antecedents of Airbnb hosts' decision-making process with an emphasis in the context of uncertainty brought about by a global pandemic.
Prior research largely studied the predicting factors of Airbnb hosts' behavioural intentions, whereas there has been a lack of study about the moderating factors which might influence the relationships between antecedents and outcomes.This paper aims to bridge this gap by assuming the moderating role of the Superhost badge.Airbnb hosts with the Superhost badge which similarly function to brand (Hardy & Dolnicar, 2018) are considered to be more experienced, have high response rates to customers' inquiries, and achieve high overall rating scores.Thus, they are expected to react differently to ordinary hosts under the impact of a worldwide pandemic.While existing studies mainly considered Superhost badge as a credibility signal and investigated the impact of this status on Airbnb consumer's purchase making decision or hosts' performance namely listing prices or the occupancy rate of the listings (e.g.D. Wang & Nicolau, 2017;Filieri et al., 2022), the novelty of this study lies on considering the salient role of this status as a moderator in Airbnb service providers' intention to continue their listings with the platform.
Based on the aforementioned research gaps, this paper conducted a web-based survey with Vietnamese hosts who have been listing their accommodation on the Airbnb platform for more than 12 months, which aims to investigate how Airbnb hosts responded to the crisis.Therefore, this paper adds to the body of knowledge about Airbnb hosts' crisis response through examining the determinants of Airbnb hosts' continuance intentions.Additionally, the Superhost badge will be firstly tested as a boundary condition that differentiates the strength of the relationships between psychological predictors and loyalty intention among a Superhost and an ordinary host.Lastly, according to Schiffman and Kanuk (2010), culture critically affects every aspect of people's value, logical thinking, and behaviour, hence, Airbnb users from culturally distinct backgrounds might respond dissimilarly under a particular event.However, the existing empirical studies in sharing accommodation platforms have been overwhelmingly conducted in the Western context, understanding of Airbnb hosts in a developing country such as Vietnam is definitely a real need and added value to the extant literature (Negi & Tripathi, 2022).

Literature review
P2P accommodation platforms with the most prominent example -Airbnb -provide a platform where travellers (Airbnb guests) and owners (Airbnb hosts) can share resources and information.They allow Airbnb hosts to earn extra income through sharing their available rooms, apartments, and houses, while travellers have a chance to choose a satisfactory accommodation (Fang et al., 2016).According to Forgacs and Dolnicar (2018), Airbnb hosts are usually considered as microentrepreneurs and not professionally trained in hospitality management.Additionally, the platform has been associated with regulatory issues such as the absence of strict health and safety regulations, or lack of emergency management strategies, which make the P2P accommodation market even more highly vulnerable to crises, compared to hotels (Guest Ready, 2018).
The serious impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on accommodation sharing platforms' business has been attracting a great number of scholars who studied service consumers and provider's perception and behavioural intentions.From the P2P accommodation providers' perspective, M. Zhang et al. (2021) conducted a qualitative study to explore how sharing accommodation hosts in China have responded towards the Covid-19 pandemic.Another example is the Farmaki et al. (2020) study which aims to explore P2P accommodation hosts' perception and response towards the impact of the pandemic in Mediterranean countries.However, Airbnb hosts from different cultural backgrounds which are usually varied in the level of uncertainty avoidance, might guide them to respond distinctly towards the crisis.Moreover, the response of different types of hosts might also be dissimilar according to their motivations, perceptions, and hosting experience.Thus, underpinned by TPB and the commitment-trust theory, the present study will explore the mechanism through which the effect of psychological factors and trust on the continuance intention of Airbnb hosts occurs along with a comparison between Airbnb ordinary hosts and Superhosts, especially in an understudied market -Vietnam.

Airbnb hosts' attitude and continuance intentions
Attitude refers to the degree of a person's favourable or unfavourable appraisal of the behaviour in question, which impacts his/her behavioural intention and consequently influences their actual behaviour (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975).In the scenario of the Airbnb platform, attitude is the overall evaluation of sharing travel accommodation with strangers through an online P2P platform.The relationship between attitude and intention has been examined in numerous articles which demonstrated that attitude predicts future behaviour.For instance, Sung et al. (2018) confirmed that accommodation providers' attitude to Airbnb positively impacts their supply intention on the platform.Huang and Kuo (2020) also found the positive influence of individuals' attitude towards providing assets in their intention to share on Airbnb and Uber platforms.In the context of crises, Elsubbaugh et al. (2004) concluded that managers' attitude is a significant antecedent of their crisis preparation, or the positive attitude of entrepreneurs is critically important in the business resilience (Pauchant & Mitroff, 1992).Hence, Airbnb hosts with a favourable attitude towards continuance behaviour may recognize and judge more business opportunities in the current pandemic, which more likely encourage them to continue listing their accommodations on the platform.Considering the strong support in the existing literature of the relationship between attitude and intention, authors proposed the following hypothesis: H1: Airbnb hosts' attitude towards business continuity positively impacts their continuance intention with the sharing platform.

Airbnb hosts' perceived behavioural control and continuance intentions
Perceived behavioural control (PBC) involves the individual's perception of ease or difficulty in performing a specific behaviour (Henle et al., 2010).In this study, it is connected with hosts' beliefs about the presence or absence of control factors such as financial ability, crisis-related knowledge and experience, that may facilitate or hinder them to continue the listings in Airbnb platform in the unprecedented crisis.PBC was usually confirmed as a strong predictor of intention in the previous TPB studies.For example, Huang and Kuo (2020) suggested that facilitating technological conditions are positively associated with property providers' perceived behavioural control, which subsequently increase their intention to share assets with strangers.The rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus impulses the application of hygiene and cleaning protocols as a required factor for the tourism and hospitality industry.Hence, to control the outbreak of the virus and guide hosts in operating the business safely, Airbnb released The Host Cleaning Protocol which includes specific guidelines on COVID-19 protection (Airbnb, 2020).From the hosts' perspective, the presence of this detailed handbook can be a perceived control factor which boosts their confidence in reducing the risk of host and guests being infected with the virus, and subsequently affect their continued use of the platform.Based on the above discussion, authors argued the following hypothesis: H2: Airbnb hosts' PBC positively affects their continuance intentions.

Airbnb hosts' subjective norms and continuance intentions
Subjective norms refer to one's perceived social pressure from salient referents to perform or not to perform the target behaviour, more particularly, the Airbnb hosts' intent to continue listing on Airbnb in this study context (Francis et al., 2004).According to Y. Wang et al. (2020), people who have contributed to and become a part of sharing platforms is a current social trend which is affected by subjective norms and social influence.Moreover, they also found that the social utility of sharing positively impacts Airbnb hosts' trust towards the sharing economy platform.The current health epidemic has left a severe challenge to Airbnb businesses in terms of the declining number of tourists and loss of revenue due to travel restriction policies, which might increase financial, safety, and security risks of Airbnb hosts' perception.People are more likely to seek the company of others when they feel threatened, or simply stating they will communicate with others for advice amid uncertainty (Hossain et al., 2013).Airbnb hosts are mostly considered as informal businesses which has restricted them from receiving the formal support from government or industry associations in the crises.Thus, to survive throughout the challenging times, they are even more reliant on their close networks.
Furthermore, prior authors also confirmed an association between subjective norms and attitude.For instance, Mao and Lyu (2017) found that subjective norms have a positive impact on the attitude of Airbnb users, while Bock et al. (2005) argued that subjective norms are an antecedent of attitudes towards sharing knowledge.Therefore, the authors proposed the following hypotheses: H3: Subjective norms influence Airbnb hosts' continuance intentions H4: Subjective norms impact Airbnb hosts' attitude towards business continuity H5: Subjective norms affect Airbnb hosts' trust towards the platform.

Trust towards Airbnb and continuance intentions
According to the commitment-trust theory, trust is one of the two fundamental factors which ensure successful relationships (Morgan & Hunt, 1994).In this theory, trust is defined as one party's confidence that the other party will keep his promises based on three main dimensions: competence, benevolence, and integrity.Especially in online businesses where distant relationships exist, the role of trust is even more emphasized in customers' decision-making process.For instance, customers' trust is positively associated with their continuance intention in mobile payment platforms (Shao et al., 2019) or mediate the relationship between online community members' satisfaction and their continuous knowledge sharing intention (Hashim & Tan, 2015).
Regarding the role of trust in P2P accommodation platforms, Y. Wang et al. (2020) documented that hosts' trust towards Airbnb is an antecedent of their continuance intention.Furthermore, this relationship can also be explained through the theoretical view of dedication-based mechanism, in which trust in Airbnb is positively related to users' affective commitment, which subsequently enhances their desire to develop and maintain the sustainable relationship with the platform (B.Kim & Kim, 2020).The COVID-19 outbreak has been severely impacting the tourism and hospitality industry in general, and Airbnb accommodation service providers in particular.The role of trust in a crisis is even more significant, as it mitigates complexity and uncertainty through an individual's acceptance of risk (Chen, 2013).Based on this evidence, it can be assumed that Airbnb hosts' trust towards Airbnb increases their willingness to take a risk in business continuity, according to the belief that the platform is competent, open, concerned, and reliable in supporting hosts in Covid-19.More simply, a high level of trust towards the platform induces Airbnb hosts' confidence in the platform's effective mechanism to protect them from the consequences of unexpected events, thus, subsequently increasing their continuing intention.Hence, it is possible to propose the below hypothesis: H6: Trust towards Airbnb positively affects hosts' business continuity intentions.

Superhost badge as a moderating variable
Airbnb accommodations are not categorized differently by star or brand as other commercial hotels; however, Airbnb service providers are recognized by newly developed quality indicatorsthe Superhost badge.Superhost is defined as "experienced hosts who are passionate about making guests' trips memorable" (Airbnb, 2017).To achieve this reputable badge, in the previous year, they are required to (1) complete at least ten trips; (2) gain a five-star rating from more than 80% of their guests; (3) respond quickly and ensure a response rate of at least 90% to guests' booking inquiries; and (4) maintain a low cancellation rate to confirmed bookings (Airbnb, 2017).Thus, an accommodation with the Superhost badge is more likely to receive positive reviews and higher ratings.Furthermore, the "Superhost" qualification is automatically assessed quarterly, hence, the host must devote a higher effort to the listings (through constantly improving facilities and service quality) compared to other hosts to obtain or retain the badge (Liang et al., 2017).Therefore, it can be justified that the Superhosts who are more experienced, might have different reactions towards business continuity with the platform, compared to ordinary hosts.
Prior research also confirmed the role of experience in an individual's future behaviour and its influence in changing the level of his/her familiarity with goods, services, or travel destinations (Baloglu, 2001).The increased familiarity with an object or situation may affect an individual's attitude towards the related behaviour.Furthermore, Baldick and Jang (2020) found that influence of social referents towards a particular behaviour on an individual's cognitive evaluation varied by own experience.Connecting this argument to the current study, Superhosts who are usually considered as more experienced and more familiar in dealing with uncertain situations, may not consider cognitive evaluation towards the opportunity of listing the accommodation during the crisis as seriously as ordinary hosts who are less experienced.Moreover, the degree of the effect of favourable subjective norms regarding business continuity on Airbnb hosts' attitude may vary across ordinary hosts and Superhosts.On the other hand, the Superhost Relief Fund from Airbnb aims to provide financial support to only Superhosts, and Airbnb Experience hosts may also impact the level of trust towards the platform among hosts.Thus, it is possible to assume the below hypotheses: H7: Superhost badge moderates the relationships between Airbnb hosts' attitude, subjective norms, PBC, trust towards Airbnb and their continuance intention.
Figure 1 illustrates a visual diagram that conceptualizes the proposed constructs of this research.

Methodology
This study used a quantitative research approach to empirically test the proposed hypotheses.Based on an extensive review of existing literature, a questionnaire was developed with five main constructs, including: Airbnb hosts' attitude towards continuance intention, subjective norms, PBC, trust towards Airbnb and continuance intention.Five academic experts and five practitioners were invited to review the initial set of items to ensure content validity, question clarity and question mistakes.Before finalizing the survey instrument, it was pre-tested in a sample of 10 Airbnb hosts to purify the measurement scale and identify if there existed any problem related to comprehension.Since all of the measurement items were written in English originally, a forward-backward translation method was applied to ensure the equivalence of meaning in the instrument.
The questionnaire included three major parts.The first part is a combination of questions related to Airbnb hosts' experience and listing information.The second part included the five main constructs with 19 items.More specifically, five items assigned to Airbnb hosts' attitude based on the studies of Hamari et al. (2016) and recommendation from experts.Three items of subjective norms and four items of perceived behavioural control were formulated from the P. Zhang and Ng (2013) study.Trust towards Airbnb comprised four items according to the study of McKnight et al. (2002) and Airbnb hosts' continuance intention was measured by three items based on Bhattacherjee and Premkumar (2004) and Deng et al. (2010) studies.All items were measured on a seven-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree; 7 = strongly agree).The final part of the questionnaire collected Airbnb hosts' demographic information.
A web-based survey was conducted on the target population of all Vietnamese Airbnb hosts with more than one year of activity before the data collection.Since this is a rare, specific and hard-to-reach population, the survey was administered on Google doc and electronically distributed to eligible respondents through a convenience sampling method.The questionnaire was posted on Facebook-based Airbnb host communities such as: Vietnam Airbnb hosts community, Airbnb hosts in Hanoi, among others.Additionally, participants were also informed that their answers would be treated confidentially and anonymously.During the challenging data collection process which conducted from December 2020 to April 2021, 204 participants answered the questionnaire.However, only 160 respondents (78.4%) were Airbnb hosts who fulfilled the criteria and were eligible to participate in this study.This sample size was considered adequate to proceed with a partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) data analysis.
The collected data were analysed using descriptive statistics and PLS-SEM.Descriptive data analysis was run to profile the sample with the IBM SPSS Statistics 26.Later, the SmartPLS 3.0 was applied to test the conceptual model.PLS was chosen over the first-generation techniques due to its minimal requirements on measurement scales, residual distributions and sample size.Since the data was collected from a cross-sectional sample and using the same likert-scale, common method bias (CMB) which negatively impacts the findings might exist (Podsakoff et al., 2012).PLS-SEM was applied to assess this problem.All variance inflation factors (VIF) with regard to latent variables resulting from a full collinearity test did not exceed 3.3, thus, the model is confirmed free of CMB (Kock, 2015).

Results
The respondents in this study are predominantly female (65.6%), married (53.1%), and holding a bachelor degree or postgraduate (90%).The average age of the participants is 32.76 years (standard deviation: 6.365) and the median is 32 years old.The largest percentage of respondents is in the age cohort between 25 and 34 (60.6%),followed by the age range from 35 to 39 with 21.3%.The majority of participants consider being an Airbnb host as their part-time job (75.6%).Approximately 66% of Vietnamese hosts participating in this study revealed that they have been listing their accommodation on the Airbnb platform for less than three years.Moreover, more than 60% of respondents are rewarded as Superhost.
Regarding the characteristics of the sampled listings, the main types of Airbnb accommodation are private apartments (57.5%) and sharing houses with other travellers (28.8%).The key motivation to be an Airbnb host is related to financial benefits (90.0%), which is followed by gaining social interactions (39.9%).Before the COVID-19 outbreak, the average number of listings of each host was at 4.52, which dropped to 2.68 at the time of data collection.See Appendix A and Appendix B for more details about the profile of study participants, their hosting experience, and listing characteristics.

Measurement model assessments
A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was performed to assess the reliability and validity of the measurement scales.Table 1 shows the loading of each item on its assigned construct, in all cases, which are above the threshold value of 0.707 (Hair et al., 2011).Moreover, construct reliability (CR) was also evaluated by observing the composite reliability indexes.In our model, these are from 0.912 to 0.957, which surpass the threshold value of 0.7 (Hair et al., 2011).Cronbach alpha of the latent factors are also found to vary from 0.855 to 0.932 (above 0.7).Thus, a high internal consistency between a set of measurement items in one construct is confirmed.Table 1 also illustrates descriptive statistics for each indicator.
To confirm convergent validity, the average variance extracted (AVE) that shows the average amount of variance between the constructs and its indicators should exceed the threshold value of 0.5 (Henseler, 2017).Table 1 presents the final AVE of each proposed construct ranging from 0.743 to 0.881, which fulfill this criterion.Furthermore, factor loadings show the significance of all indicators (p-values < 0.001), which again confirm the excellent convergent validity.According to Fornell and Larcker (1981), discriminant validity was evaluated through a comparison of the square root of each AVE and the correlations between each construct and other latent variables.As shown in Table 2, the square root of AVE for each construct was found to exceed the correlation coefficients for the inter-constructs.Additionally, the Heterotrait -Monotrait ratios (HTMT) for all constructs were lower than 0.85 (see Table 2) which also confirm discriminant validity.

Assessing the structural model and testing hypotheses
In order to quantify the predictive capabilities of the structural model, the coefficients of determination (R 2 ) for the endogenous constructs were measured.The R 2 for the final endogenous construct of the model ("continuance intention") was 0.541, which indicates a large proportion of variance explained by its predictors including: attitude, PBC, subjective norms and trust towards Airbnb.For Airbnb hosts' attitude towards business continuity and trust towards Airbnb platform, subjective norms explain a moderate proportion of its variance (R 2 = 0.213 and R 2 = 0.054, respectively).

Testing the moderating effect of superhost badge
Table 4 presents results of a non-parametric test to examine whether the proposed relationships between attitude, subjective norms, PBC, trust towards Airbnb, and Airbnb hosts' business continuity intention (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6), were being affected by Superhost badge status.Results from the Welch-Satterthwait test confirmed that there are interestingly significant differences in the proposed relationships among the ordinary Airbnb hosts and those hosts with Superhost badge.More particularly, Airbnb ordinary hosts perceived stronger impact of attitude on continuance intention or stronger influence of subjective norms on attitude and trust towards the platform compared with Airbnb Superhosts.Contrastingly, trust towards Airbnb has a stronger influence in continuance intention among Superhosts.Exceptionally, the associations among perceived behavioural control, subjective norms and continuance intention were not significantly different in these two groups (p-values > 0.05).Thus, H7 is partially supported.

Conclusion and implications
The findings of this study have shown that Airbnb hosts' attitude, PBC and trust towards the platform are positively related to their business continuity.More specifically, Airbnb hosts' favourable attitude was found to hold a significant impact on their intention to continue listing accommodations on the platform.This finding coincides with prior research from Huang and Kuo (2020) and Sung et al. (2018) which argued the influential role of service providers' attitude towards sharing platforms in their supply intention.Additionally, the role of favourable evaluation towards the P2P rental platform was also proven in the Farmaki et al. ( 2020) study which was conducted in Mediterranean countries in Covid-19.They found that the "optimistic hosts" believe the possibility of the pandemic in positively transforming the accommodation sharing economy, when customers may change their preferences to more isolating types of lodges with less personal contact.
Regarding the positive impact of PBC on Airbnb hosts' continuance intentions, this study confirms the proposed hypothesis, which is in line with extant studies (e.g.Huang & Kuo, 2020).Similarly, the capabilities of accommodation service providers were also found as one of the key determinants which distinguishes the decision-making process among different types of hosts in China, in which speculators who are short on external and internal capabilities, will more likely to quit the market (M.Zhang et al., 2021).Therefore, the findings of this study prove that the impact of attitude and PBC on Airbnb users' behavioural intention remains significant regardless of different cultural backgrounds or various situations.
This paper also confirms the most significant importance of trust towards the platform on Airbnb hosts' business continuity intention.The more Airbnb hosts perceive the trustworthiness of the platform, the more they are likely to continue providing their accommodation on Airbnb even in the prevailing disaster.This finding concurs with earlier research which confirmed the relationship between users' trust and their intentions of participation continuance in the online platforms (e.g.Hashim & Tan, 2015;Shao et al., 2019); or Airbnb platform users' trust and loyalty intention (B.Kim & Kim, 2020;Y. Wang et al., 2020).While the original TPB does not consider the trust variable as a driving factor of intention, trust is once again confirmed to play the most important role in motivating Airbnb hosts' business continuity, which acknowledges the need of integrating the established theories to better predict P2P platform users' behavioural intentions.
The path coefficient between subjective norms and continuance intention is not significant which is in contrast to our proposed hypothesis.This finding is consistent with Cho et al. (2010), which found the weak effect of subjective norms on online communities, or Huang and Kuo (2020), which also confirmed the insignificant impact of subjective norms on intention to share among potential sharing service providers.This insignificant relationship can be further explained by the fact that Airbnb is not familiar to the majority of the Vietnamese population, thus, Airbnb hosts are aware that their significant ones do not really understand about the business to provide wise advice in this situation.Though subjective norms are not positively related to Airbnb hosts' continuance intention, it does significantly affect Airbnb hosts' favourable evaluations towards the business continuity or increases their trust towards the platform.These results are in line with earlier studies which pronounced the effect of social utility of sharing or subjective norms in enhancing sharing platform users' attitude and building up trust (Mao & Lyu, 2017;Y. Wang et al., 2020).With respect to the moderating role of Superhost badge, the effect of Airbnb hosts' attitude on their continuance intention, or the impact of social influences on Airbnb accommodation providers' attitude and trust towards the platform are stronger for ordinary hosts compared to Superhosts.These findings support the previous study which stated that subjective norms became less important when people are more experienced (Karahanna et al., 1999), or the effect of social referents on attitude varied by past experience (Baldick & Jang, 2020).On the other hand, Superhosts who are deemed to receive the relief fund from Airbnb, are more likely to continue their business with Airbnb when they find the sharing platform more trustworthy.This finding concurs with extant literature which stated that professional hosts who are more likely to obtain this reputation badge, place more trust on Airbnb as an institution (Arvanitidis et al., 2022), which ultimately results in higher intention to continue listings on the platform throughout the global pandemic.Exceptionally, the influences of PBC and subjective norms in continuance intention are not significantly different between Airbnb ordinary hosts and Superhosts.
As to its theoretical implications, this study enriches the emerging literature on the accommodation sharing industry from the lens of service providers and advances the theory in the field of microentrepreneurs' response towards crises by providing the following theoretical implications.While a great deal of hospitality and tourism-related research has exploited TPB to explain individual's behavioural intention, this study firstly investigates the determinants of micro business owners' continuance intention in the sharing economy through the integration of TPB and the commitment-trust theory.The findings of this paper not only support the applicability of TPB but also provide strong evidence that trust is a key influential factor in an P2P platform users' decision-making process in the uncertain situations, which deems the need of comprising established theories to explain P2P users' participation continuance better.
Second, a recent literature review on the Airbnb phenomenon from Negi and Tripathi (2022) has identified the lack of studies which focus on the hosts' psychological, behavioural and decisionmaking process.Moreover, they also urged more investigations about Airbnb in developing nations.Approaching these significant gaps, the present study contributes to the existing literature on Airbnb service providers' continuance intention with an emphasis in an understudied context -Vietnam, especially in the setting of a health-related crisis.
Third, the novelty of this study lies in testing the moderating role of Superhost badge in Airbnb hosts' behavioural intentions, which approaches the call from Kwok and Xie (2018).While the previous studies adopted Signalling theory to confirm the moderating role of Superhost badge as risk reduction signal for Airbnb guests in lessening the negative impact of host cancellations on occupancy rate (Filieri et al., 2022), this study found the contrasting moderating effect of Superhost badge in reducing the positive impact of attitudinal and social factors on Airbnb hosts' decisionmaking process.Therefore, these findings theoretically contribute to the literature on the different role of credibility signals from the perspective of P2P accommodation providers.
Understanding the determinants of P2P accommodation providers' continuance intention in the global pandemic could benefit the sustainable development of the emerging sharing economy.Trust towards the platform was found to be the most influential factor in stimulating Airbnb hosts' intention to continue sharing.Nevertheless, the policy of cancelling bookings with a full refund from Airbnb during the outbreak, or the unequal support to ordinary hosts, has reduced Airbnb hosts' trust in the crisis response strategies of the platform.Thus, Airbnb should balance their strategies in terms of ensuring equal benefits to both Airbnb consumers and providers.Furthermore, Airbnb needs to promote and provide the appropriate safeguards, technological advances, prompt support and a safe business environment to increase hosts' trust and encourage them to maintain listings on the platform.
The platform management should also provide more tool kits, or online training and workshops about how to maintain short-term rental safely and sustainably in order to enhance Airbnb hosts' perceived behavioural control.The platform should also work closely with local authorization regarding the real impact of COVID-19 in the area and the opportunities of remaining listings, which might improve Airbnb hosts' favourable evaluation towards the business continuity.Though social norms do not directly influence Airbnb hosts' continuance intention, this construct still plays a significant role in Airbnb hosts' attitude and trust towards the platform, especially among Airbnb ordinary hosts.Thus, peer reviews or Airbnb forums should be well managed to exchange the ideas and crisis management experiences among hosts, which finally influence their likelihood of continuance intention through improving their positive attitude and trust towards the platform.Finally, this study reveals that the way Airbnb ordinary hosts and Superhosts perceive the influential role of attitude, subjective norms, PBC and trust towards the platform on their continuance intention is distinct which provides useful information to Airbnb management in improving their support policy to these service providers more effectively and efficiently.
Although the paper provides theoretical and practical implications, it still has limitations which offer opportunities for future studies.First, the purpose of this research is to delve into Vietnamese Airbnb hosts' continuance intention, thus, the research is highly destination-specific and might not generalize these findings to other countries with different cultural backgrounds.Second, this study only extends the TPB model with trust towards Airbnb and confirms their predicting role in Airbnb hosts' intention.As mentioned earlier, trust in Airbnb refers to a dedication-based factor, while previous research argued that the continued intention of customers is more strongly related to constraint-based factors, which usually create a "lock-in" and mitigate customers' interest in other alternatives (Lin et al., 2015;S. S. Kim & Son, 2009).Hence, further research could add in more constraint-based factors (such as relative attractiveness, switching costs, calculative commitment), which might improve the explained variance of Airbnb hosts' continuity intention.
Third, the majority of study participants were female (65.6%), which generally represents the whole population of Airbnb hosts.However, male and female hosts are varied in their level of risk averse, which might impact the effect of trust, attitude, perceived social pressure, and PBC on crisis response strategies.Therefore, future research should purposely recruit participants with a more appropriate ratio of different genders and motivations, or consider hosts' personality as moderators in studying the relationship between their psychological factors and behavioural intentions.Finally, the scope of this study is to examine the influencing factors of Airbnb hosts' intent to continue listing their accommodation on the platform, which findings can support the sustainable development of the sharing economy, future researchers might also focus on studying Airbnb hosts' discontinuance or switching intention to have a more overall picture of Airbnb hosts' crisis response.

Table 1 .
Descriptives and results of the measurement model.

Table 3 .
The result of direct tests.

Table 4 .
Test for structural invariance.