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Abstract
How diverse are sharing economy platforms? Are they fair marketplaces, where all participants operate on a level playing field, or are they large-scale online aggregators of offline human biases? Often portrayed as easy-to-access digital spaces whose participants receive equal opportunities, such platforms have recently come under fire due to reports of discriminatory behaviours among their users, and have been associated with gentrification phenomena that exacerbate preexisting inequalities along racial lines. In this paper, we focus on the Airbnb sharing economy platform, and analyse the diversity of its user base across five large cities. We find it to be predominantly young, female, and white. Notably, we find this to be true even in cities with a diverse racial composition. We then introduce a method based on the statistical analysis of networks to quantify behaviours of homophily, heterophily and avoidance between Airbnb hosts and guests. Depending on cities and property types, we do find signals of such behaviours relating both to race and gender. We use these findings to provide platform design recommendations, aimed at exposing and possibly reducing the biases we detect, in support of a more inclusive growth of sharing economy platforms.
Highlights
Sharing economy platforms are new manifestations of century old phenomena
Often thought of as level-playing fields, where all participants receive the same opportunities, sharing economy platforms might instead end up acting as online aggregators of well-known offline human dynamics and biases
We provide an overview of the demographic characteristics of Airbnb hosts and guests, whose profile pictures we scraped and annotated using the process described in the Airbnb Data section
Summary
Sharing economy platforms are new manifestations of century old phenomena. Resource circulation systems that facilitate the exchange of underutilized goods or services between consumers have long existed in the form of flea markets, garage sales, second-hand shops, just to name a few. Airbnb has led to the emergence of short-term rent gaps between different areas of New York City [2] and has contributed to exacerbating the affordable (2019) 8:11 housing crisis in Los Angeles [3]. These phenomena, in turn, typically accelerate preexisting divides along racial lines, fostering inequalities between the Airbnb community and the communities living in the neighbourhoods where Airbnb has a significant presence (see, e.g., [4])
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