Information is supposed to be the antidote to distrust on the Internet. You’ll buy from an unknown retailer on Amazon because you can see the seller’s rating. You’ll get in a stranger’s car with Uber because you know upfront the driver’s name and license plate. You’ll rent someone’s private home on Airbnb because the host has a public identity: Ann in Brooklyn who likes baking cakes and looks perfectly nice in her profile photo.
The decline in online anonymity, though, may introduce its own problems. Researchers at the Harvard Business School studying Airbnb now warn that all this information makes it easier for us to discriminate.
Researchers Benjamin Edelman, Michael Luca and Dan Svirsky sent out 6,400 messages earlier this year to hosts in five cities — Washington, D.C., Baltimore, St. Louis, Los Angeles and Dallas — from invented accounts looking to rent homes on the site under distinctly black and white names. Among the replies, the study uncovered “widespread discrimination” against black guests, and by nearly every kind of host.
The guest profiles were identical in all cases with the exception of the names, and the profiles did not include personal photos. Queries from guests with white-sounding names were accepted about 50 percent of the time. From black-sounding names, 42 percent were accepted. The study did not test Latino or Asian names.
That result doesn’t imply that Airbnb hosts are any more prone to discrimination than other groups, or Americans in general. The findings are in line with the degree of racial discrimination found in other studies about who gets taxi tips, job call-backs or good rates on classified ads. Similar results have turned up on eBay. And this latest audit experiment was modeled off a well-known study by Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, who found racial discrimination in the job market when they sent out résumés with black- and white-sounding names.
