In December 2015, Mike Luca, Dan Svirsky, and I posted the results of an experiment in which we created test Airbnb guest accounts, some with black names and some with white names, finding that the latter got favorable responses from hosts more often than the latter. Black users widely reported similar problems — Twitter #AirbnbWhileBlack — and in September 2016 Airbnb responded with a report discussing the problem and Airbnb’s plans for response.
I promptly posted a critique of Airbnb’s plans, broadly arguing that Airbnb’s commitments were minimal and that the company had ignored a simpler and more effective alternative. But ultimately the proof is in the results. Do minority guests still have trouble booking rooms at Airbnb? Available evidence indicates that they do.
Below is a table based on work of Jessica Min (Harvard College ’18) as part of her undergraduate thesis measuring discrimination against Muslim guests. The table summarizes eight studies, with data collected as early as July 2015 (mine) and as late as November-December 2017 (hers), the latter postdating Airbnb’s report by more than a year. Each study finds minority users at a disadvantage, statistically significantly so.
| Author/title/place and year of publication | Dates of data collection | Sample size | Summary of findings | Noteworthy secondary findings |
| Edelman, Benjamin, Michael Luca, and Dan Svirsky.
Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2017. |
July 2015 | 6,400 listings across five U.S. cities | Guests with distinctively black names received positive responses 42% of the time, compared to 50% for white guests.
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Results were persistent across type of hosts (i.e. race, gender, experience level, type and neighborhood of listing).
Discrimination was concentrated among hosts with no African American guests in their review history. Hosts lost $65 to $100 of revenue for each black guest rejected. |
| Ameri, Mason, Sean Rogers, Lisa Schur, and Douglas Kruse.
No Room At The Inn? Disability Access in The New Sharing Economy. Working paper, 2017. |
June to November 2016 | 3,847 listings across 48 U.S. states | Guests with disabilities received positive responses less often. Hosts preapproved 75% of guests without disabilities, but only 61% of guests with dwarfism, 50% of blind guests, 43% of guests with cerebral palsy, and 25% of guests with spinal cord injury. | Airbnb’s non-discrimination policy, which took effect midway through data collection, did not have a significant effect on host responses to guests with disabilities. |
| Ahuja, Rishi and Ronan C. Lyons.
The Silent Treatment: LGBT Discrimination in the Sharing Economy. Working paper, 2017. |
June – July 2016 | 794 listings in Dublin, Ireland | Guests in male same-sex relationships were approximately 25 percentage points less likely to be accepted than identical guests in heterosexual relationships or female same-sex relationships. | The difference was driven by non-responses from hosts, not outright rejection.
The difference persisted across a variety of host and location characteristics. Male hosts and hosts with many listings were less likely to discriminate. |
| Cui, Ruomeng and Li, Jun and Zhang, Dennis J.
Working paper, 2016. |
Three audit studies. Summarizing the results as to guests without prior reviews: | |||
| September 2016 | 598 listings in Chicago, Boston, and Seattle | Guests with distinctively black names received positive responses 29% of the time, compared to 48% for white guests. | The authors assess hosts’ apparent reasons for discrimination, including whether hosts were engaged in statistical discrimination and whether reviews reduce the problem of discrimination. | |
| October – November 2016 | 250 listings in Boston and Seattle | Guests with distinctively black names received positive responses 41% of the time, compared to 63% for white guests. | ||
| July – August 2017 | 660 listings in Boston, Seattle, and Austin | Guests with distinctively black names received positive responses 42% of the time, compared to 53% for white guests. | ||
| Sveriges Radio’s Kaliber show, Sweden | October 2016 | 200 listings in Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö | For hosts who said no to guests with black-sounding names, a second inquiry was then sent from a guest with a white-sounding name. Of hosts who had previously declined the black guest, many told the white guest that the listing was available. | Methodology follows longstanding testing for discrimination in US housing markets, sending a white applicant after a landlord declines a black prospective tenant. |
| Min, Jessica
No Room for Muhammad: Evidence of Discrimination from a Field Experiment over Airbnb in Australia. Undergraduate honors thesis, 2018. |
November – December 2017 | 813 listings in Sydney, Australia | Guests with distinctively Middle Eastern names received positive responses 13.5 percentage points less often, compared to identical guests with white-sounding names. | Results were persistent across all hosts, including hosts with shared properties and those with expensive listings.
Discrimination was most prominent for hosts with highly sought-after listings, where hosts can reject disfavored guests with confidence of finding replacements. |
My bottom line remains as I remarked in fall 2016: Airbnb’s proposed responses are unlikely to solve the problem and indeed have not done so. Truly fixing discrimination at Airbnb will require more far-reaching efforts, likely including preventing hosts from seeing guests’ faces before a booking is confirmed. Anything less is just distraction and demonstrably insufficient to solve this important, and long-festering, problem.