Abductive Drama Theory Approach for Structuring and Analyzing Systemic Pathologies of Social Interactions: Case of Peer-to-Peer Accommodation

Peer-to-peer (P2P) accommodation has been rising in terms of popularity as an alternative to more conventional accommodation like hotels and resorts. Unlike conventional accommodation, P2P accommodation relies solely on online platforms to manage bookings. Most of the service providers of P2P accommodation are the personal owners of private property. They would rent their place through the platform to the guest; hence they are called the host. This puts hosts in a difficult situation as they have to put trust in a stranger over their property. Guests are also in the position to trust the profile of the host in the platform, and whether the host could deliver the service they promised on the platform. The dynamic interaction between host and guest both online and offline creates a dilemmatic situation for them and therefore is suitable to be examined through the lenses of the Drama Theory framework. Most of the past studies relating to the host–guest interaction of P2P accommodation have been centered around trust and its antecedent. This study offers a different view of the guest–host interaction by examining their position relating to each other goals. We also want to expand the analysis of dilemma analysis commonly done in Drama Theory, by using pathology analysis that could help understand how actors could fail to overcome their dilemma. However, since pathology analysis has only been introduced, we need to structure it further to build a coherent analytic tool. We combine dilemma analysis and pathology analysis of Drama Theory with an abductive approach for this study. This study focuses on Airbnb as one of the biggest P2P accommodation platforms. The data is acquired through observation of a peer-to-peer accommodation platform in Bandung, Indonesia, and Focus Group Discussions with the hosts that have received a “superhost” rating. Observation and FGD would be analyzed using dilemma and pathology analysis to come up with a rich map of guest–host interaction dynamics. Our result shows that in the host-guest interaction of P2P accommodation settings, both of them could be trapped in a dilemmatic situation and fail to overcome it properly, hence also caught in a pathological situation.