The Visible Hand: Race and Online Market Outcomes

Jennifer Doleac and Luke Stein

No 09-015, Discussion Papers from Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: We examine the effect of race on market outcomes by selling iPods through local online classified advertisements throughout the United States in a year-long field experiment. Each ad features a photograph of the product being held by a dark- or light-skinned (“black” or “white”) hand. Black sellers do worse than white sellers on a variety of market outcome measures: they receive 13% fewer responses and 17% fewer offers. Conditional on receiving at least one offer, black sellers also receive 2–4% lower offers, despite the selfselected—and presumably less biased—pool of buyers. In addition, buyers corresponding with black sellers exhibit lower trust: they are 17% less likely to include their name in e-mails, 44% less likely to accept delivery by mail, and 56% more likely to express concern about making a long-distance payment. We find evidence that black sellers suffer particularly poor outcomes in thin markets; it appears that discrimination may not “survive” in the presence of significant competition among buyers. Furthermore, black sellers do worst in the most racially isolated markets and markets with high property crime rates, suggesting a role for statistical discrimination in explaining the disparity.

Keywords: advertising discrimination; race; marketing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-05
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (39)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www-siepr.stanford.edu/repec/sip/09-015.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Visible Hand: Race and Online Market Outcomes (2013)
Working Paper: The Visible Hand: Race and Online Market Outcomes (2011)
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:sip:dpaper:09-015

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anne Shor ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).