HKS Affiliated Authors
Lee J. Styslinger III Associate Professor of Business Administration, HBS
Excerpt
Excerpt
Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment. Benjamin Edelman, Michael Luca, December 9, 2015, "Online marketplaces increasingly choose to reduce the anonymity of buyers and sellers in order to facilitate trust. We demonstrate that this common market design choice results in an important unintended consequence: racial discrimination. In a field experiment on Airbnb, we find that requests from guests with distinctively African-American names are roughly 16% less likely to be accepted than identical guests with distinctively White names. The difference persists..." Link