Does physical attractiveness facilitate customer citizenship behaviors? Cross-cultural evidence from the peer-to-peer economy

As customer co-creation behaviors in the peer-to-peer (P2P) economy become an increasingly important part of the global economy, the study of its drivers is of great necessity. One of the important yet overlooked drivers is digital physical attractiveness. This research draws on impression formation theory to examine how physical attractiveness drives customer citizenship behaviors in the P2P economy. More importantly, the current study investigates the non-linear effect of digital physical attractiveness and how the physical attractiveness effect differs across cultures. Two studies are used to test the framework. Study 1 uses secondary data crawled from China’s largest P2P accommodation-sharing platform. Study 2 analyzes the survey data from 533 accommodation-sharing customers in China (n = 213), Hungary (n = 159), and the U.S. (n = 161). Results found an n-shaped (inverted U) physical attractiveness effect in Study 1 in China, but a U-shaped effect in the cross-cultural context. The U-shaped effect is only effective when customers score high on collectivism, low on power distance, or low on masculinity.