Effects of Host Race Information on Airbnb Listing Prices in San Francisco

Venoo Kakar, Julisa Franco, Joel Voelz and Julia Wu

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The surge in Peer to Peer e-commerce has increasingly been characterized by changing the online marketplace to a more personalized environment for the buyer and seller. This personalization involves revealing information on buyer reviews, pictures and biographical information on the sellers to reduce the perceived ``purchase risk" or to facilitate trust with the buyers. However, this personalization has generated possibilities for discrimination in the online marketplace. In this paper, we examine the effect of host information available online (race, gender and sexual orientation etc.) on price listings on Airbnb.com in San Francisco. We find that hispanic hosts and asian hosts, on average, have a 9.6% and 9.3% lower list price relative to their white counterparts, after controlling for neighborhood property values, user reviews and rental unit characteristics. We don't find any significant impact of gender and sexual orientation on price listings. Overall, our findings corroborate the presence of racial discrimination in the online marketplace.

Keywords: Airbnb; Discrimination; Race; Online marketplace (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D40 D47 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-03-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-mkt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/78275/1/MPRA_paper_78275.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:69974

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