The Impact of Qualitative Reviews on Racial Statistical Discrimination: Evidence from Airbnb

James Morris

Cambridge Working Papers in Economics from Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge

Abstract: This paper analyses the effect of qualitative reviews on racial statistical discrimination. Using a fine-tuned Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) language model that was developed specifically for this task, I include the effects of recent qualitative reviews on the log listing price difference between Black and White hosts on Airbnb. For properties without guest reviews, I find a 4% log listing price difference between Black and White hosts for comparable properties. Once review information becomes available, this pricing difference reduces to 1%, providing evidence against the persistence of racial listing price differences on Airbnb, and furthermore, suggesting that race is used as the primary signal of property quality only in the absence of better information. Beyond its applications within the context of Airbnb, this paper aims to explain how the early provision of detailed qualitative information can reduce the effects of statistical discrimination against minorities.

Keywords: Airbnb; Discrimination; Race; Online marketplace (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D83 J15 L84 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-03-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des, nep-mac, nep-pay and nep-ure
Note: jm2377
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/pub ... pe-pdfs/cwpe2331.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cam:camdae:2331

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Cambridge Working Papers in Economics from Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jake Dyer ().