Do Workers Discriminate against Their Out-group Employers? Evidence from the Gig Economy

Sher Afghan Asad (), Ritwik Banerjee and Joydeep Bhattacharya
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Sher Afghan Asad: Lahore University of Management Sciences

No 13012, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We study possible worker-to-employer discrimination manifested via social preferences in an online labor market. Specifically, we ask, do workers exhibit positive social preferences for an out-race employer relative to an otherwise-identical, own-race one? We run a well-powered, model-based experiment wherein we recruit 6,000 workers from Amazon's M-Turk platform for a real-effort task and randomly (and unobtrusively) reveal to them the racial identity of their non-fictitious employer. Strikingly, we find strong evidence of race-based altruism – white workers, even when they do not benefit personally, work relatively harder to generate more income for black employers. Self-declared white Republicans and Independents exhibit significantly more altruism relative to Democrats. Notably, the altruism does not seem to be driven by race-specific beliefs about the income status of the employers. Our results suggest the possibility that pro-social behavior of whites toward blacks, atypical in traditional labor markets, may emerge in the gig economy where associative (dis)taste is naturally muted due to limited social contact.

Keywords: Gig Economy; taste-based discrimination; social preferences; worker-to-employer; discrimination; mechanical turk; Structural Behavioral Economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D91 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 75 pages
Date: 2020-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-lma and nep-soc
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - published as 'Do workers discriminate against their out-group employers? Evidence from an online platform economy' in: Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2023, 216, 221 - 242

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Working Paper: Do workers discriminate against their out-group employers? Evidence from the gig economy (2020)
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