Company Background:
Airbnb is an online popular marketplace for short-term rentals, where people list or rent their apartment, houses or even spare rooms they have in their houses. The company makes money from charging commission to both the host and the guest. It was founded in 2008 and has around three million lodging listings in 165,000 cities and 191 countries.
Racial Profiling:
It all started in 2015 with a twitter hashtag called #AirbnbWhileBlack, where African-American users shared their rejection stories while using Airbnb. In january 2016, a study done by Harvard Business School concluded that applications with distinctively African-American names were 16% less likely to be accepted relatively to applications with distinctively white names. The study was done by sending out 6,400 booking requests from fake Airbnb account without pictures, and 50% of the time white-sounding names were booked successfully compared to 42% for African-American names.
Airbnb Reactions:
- Implementing policies that play down the use of photos of hosts and guests, while emphasizing trip details, reviews, and user verification.
- Pushing a new policy, where hosts agree to treat everyone with respect regardless of race, religion, national origin or ethnicity and violators will be banned from the site.
- Increasing instant bookings so the guest does not have to wait for host pre-approval.
- Hiring a permanent full time team to fight bias and promote diversity.
- Open door service which ensures renters who experience discrimination find a place to stay even if it is not through Airbnb.
My question is: Do you think those solutions will be enough for Airbnb to weed out discrimination among its platform?
Sources:
I found this presentation especially interesting because many of my friends use Airbnb and I was unaware of any of the present bias. After the presentation Cole said that he did a presentation on Airbnb and racial profiling that occurs. He said that his team proposed that Airbnb implement a three strikes systems where hosts will get kicked off the system if they are accused of racial profiling three times. I think that is a great idea because they have the chance to re-evaluate their actions.
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