Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment

By Benjamin Edelman, Michael Luca, D. Svirsky. 2017

909 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In an experiment on Airbnb, we find that applications from guests with distinctively African American names are 16 percent less likely to be accepted relative to identical guests with distinctively white names. Discrimination occurs among landlords of all sizes, including small landlords sharing the property and larger landlords with multiple properties. It is most pronounced among hosts who have never had an African American guest, suggesting only a subset of hosts discriminate. While rental markets have achieved significant reductions in discrimination in recent decades, our results suggest that Airbnb's current design choices facilitate discrimination and raise the possibility of erasing some of these civil rights gains.

Subfields: Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/91245899101d9630aa3daffdbcd93908f44a0624

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Citations in the corpus

Racial Bias in Bail Decisions ⇤ (2018, neutral): “[37] Edelman, Benjamin, Michael Luca, and Dan Svirsky.”
The Effect of Home-Sharing on House Prices and Rents: Evidence from Airbnb (2021, neutral): “2Another criticism of Airbnb is that the company does not do enough to combat racial discrimination on its platform (Edelman and Luca, 2014; Edelman et al., 2017) or that it generates negative externalities for neighbors (Filippas and Horton, 2018) though we will not directly address these issues in”
Sharing versus collaborative economy: how to align ICT developments and the SDGs in tourism? (2019, background): “Frenken and Schor (2017) highlight, however, that this only considers first round effects, arguing that where an income is generated through sharing an underutilized product, this may be used to obtain new goods. Likewise, the low cost of using shared goods may stimulate consumption (Palgan et al., ”
Algorithms at Work: The New Contested Terrain of Control (2020, background): “Customers have been shown to discriminate in online labor markets (Chan & Wang, 2018; Edelman, Luca, & Svirsky, 2017).”
Marketing in the Sharing Economy (2019, background): “Open questions remain regarding the extent to which these marketplaces should be treated as traditional firms when it comes to matters of regulation, ranging from labor, to consumer health and safety, to discrimination (Edelman, Luca, and Svirsky 2017).”
LBS Research Online (2021, positive): “Edelman and Luca (2014) and Edelman et al. (2017) document racially discriminatory behavior in an online rental market.”
Fairness Incentives for Myopic Agents (2017, background): “2 Airbnb has very recently received scrutiny over both anecdotal reports and systematic studies of racist behavior by landlords on their platform ([5]).”
The Current and Future State of the Sharing Economy (2017, background): “A Harvard study determined that renters with African-American sounding names were 16 per cent less likely to be accepted by hosts on Airbnb (Edelman & Luca, 2015).”
Economics, Fairness and Algorithmic Bias (2020, neutral): “A small literature studies the design of marketplaces that neutralize discriminatory behavior (Edelman et al., 2017).”