hide identifying information about Airbnb guests in order to facilitate discrimination-free evaluation by hosts. 
 
 Debias Yourself offers a simple tool to reduce discrimination at online platforms such as Airbnb. Online platforms have the potential to create fairer, more inclusive transactions. Because they facilitate commerce at a distance, they can conceal information that might otherwise be used for discrimination. However, these advantages are by no means guaranteed, and in fact they depend on design choices made by each online platform. Indeed, many sharing economy marketplaces have moved in the opposite direction, requiring users to share personal information before transactions are confirmed. Our research documents a troubling side effect: racial discrimination against guests on Airbnb is pervasive. But what can an individual host on Airbnb do to combat this problem? The design choices Airbnb makes are outside your control. And biases can be implicit, therefore hard to avoid. We created the Debias Yourself browser plugin to give hosts the power to fight this problem. When a guest contacts a host, Debias Yourself removes information that can facilitate discrimination. A host can view the guest’s message and past reviews without having to see the guest’s face or name. This way, the host can review and accept guest requests on a nondiscriminatory basis, considering a guest’s request on the merits (such as dates, number of people, and purpose of the visit) without information that conveys race, gender, or age (such as name and photograph). In future versions, we will add support for other online marketplaces. While we designed the Debias Yourself browser plugin primarily for hosts (to evaluate guest requests without considering race or other sensitive factors), the plugin can also be used by guests who wish to evaluate properties without regard to host characteristics. ||||| 
 
 Airbnb 
 
 Information is supposed to be the antidote to distrust on the Internet. You'll buy from an unknown retailer on Amazon because you can see the seller's rating. You'll get in a stranger's car with Uber because you know up front the driver's name and license plate. You'll rent someone's private home on Airbnb because the host has a public identity: Ann in Brooklyn who likes baking cakes and looks perfectly nice in her profile photo. 
 
 The decline in online anonymity, though, may introduce its own problems. Researchers at the Harvard Business School studying Airbnb now warn that all this information makes it easier for us to discriminate. 
 
 Researchers Benjamin Edelman, Michael Luca and Dan Svirsky sent out 6,400 messages earlier this year to hosts in five cities — D.C., Baltimore, St. Louis, Los Angeles and Dallas — from invented accounts looking to rent homes on the site under distinctly black and white names. Among the replies, the study uncovered "widespread discrimination" against black guests, and by nearly every kind of host. 
 
 The guest profiles were identical in all cases with the exception of the names, and the profiles did not include personal photos. Queries from guests with white-sounding names were accepted about 50 percent of the time. From black-sounding names, 42 percent were accepted. The study did not test Hispanic or Asian names. 
 
 An example of the fake inquiries used in the study. "Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment," by B. Edelman et al. 
 
 That result doesn't imply that Airbnb hosts are any more prone to discrimination than other groups, or Americans in general. The findings are in line with the degree of racial discrimination found in other studies about who gets taxi tips or job call-backs or good rates on classified ads. Similar results have turned up on eBay. And this latest audit experiment was modeled off a well-known study by Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, who found racial discrimination in the job market when they sent out resumés with black- and white-sounding names. The Airbnb study even used the same names: Tamika vs. Laurie, Darnell vs. Brad and more. 
 
 This new study, though, does suggest that the particular design of Airbnb's platform may enable people to act on the implicit bias that many of us have. That's because Airbnb — in its quest to create trust — asks users to post photos and provide their real names. 
 
 “Nobody at Airbnb was thinking to themselves, ‘let’s build a platform where we could discriminate,’” says Luca, one of the co-authors. “And I think most hosts are not going on there thinking ‘oh-no, there’s no way I’m letting somebody who’s African-American stay in my place.’ I think more of what’s happening is a subtle, unconscious bias.” 
 
 Its detectable presence is notable, though, in contrast with other hotel providers like Marriott, or online marketplaces like Expedia where the mechanism to discriminate doesn't exist. 
 
 "On Priceline the rate of discrimination has to be zero, because there’s no way for a hotel on Priceline to look at your name and then say 'I don’t want to accept you on the basis of your name,'" Luca says (Priceline, or any other source outside the university, did not provide funding for this study, he says). 
 
 That doesn't mean that the desk clerks at a Marriott are any less likely to have implicit bias than your average Airbnb host. "This is absolutely not a story about how people are bigots on Airbnb — that’s simply an implausible story," Luca says. "This is entirely about the choices that online platforms make that either facilitate or prevent discrimination." 
 
 To this point, the researchers have developed a browser plugin called Debias Yourself that Airbnb users can deploy in Chrome to scrape names and photos off of the home-rental site. If you're worried you may be influenced by subtle bias, their tool will edit Airbnb for you to remove that possibility. ("That isn’t quite what Airbnb intended," the researchers explain of their plugin, "but it’s your computer, and it’s your right to configure it as you see fit.") 
 
 For its part, Airbnb says it strongly believes that profile photos and real names are important to build trust between guests and hosts. But a spokesperson added that the company is in touch with the researchers. 
 
 "We are committed to making Airbnb one of the most open, trusted, diverse, transparent communities in the world," the company said in a statement. "We recognize that bias and discrimination are significant challenges, and we welcome the opportunity to work with anyone that can help us reduce potential discrimination in the Airbnb community." 
 
 In their study, Edelman, Luca and Svirsky also learned a lot more than we usually do in experiments like these about the people doing the discriminating (by contrast, when you send a resume to an employer and never hear back, you don't know much about the person who discarded it). Because Airbnb shows information about both guests and hosts, the authors gathered data on the second group, too. 
 
 They found remarkably consistent effects: The discrimination appeared to come from both black and white hosts, men and women, hosts renting entire properties and those sharing rooms in their homes. It came from hosts listing expensive properties as well as cheap ones. And the neighborhood didn't seem to matter either — hosts in diverse neighborhoods discriminated about as much as hosts in homogenous places. 
 
 There was one exception to this broad pattern: Black female hosts didn't appear to discriminate against black female guests. 
 
 For all of these other hosts, the researchers found, discrimination is costly (which is another lesson that extends beyond Airbnb). Hosts who rejected a black guest often never found a replacement customer for those same dates. As a result, the researchers calculated that individual instances of discrimination translated to forgoing about $65-$100 in revenue. ||||| By Carmen Nobel 
 
 White vacationers have an easier time booking an Airbnb rental property than African-Americans do, according to a new study from faculty at Harvard Business School. 
 
 The problem seems to lie in all the personal information – names and profile pictures – that are inherent in many online marketplaces of the so-called sharing economy. “To facilitate trust, many online platforms like Airbnb encourage sellers to provide personal profiles and even to post pictures of themselves” says HBS Associate Professor Ben Edelman, who conducted the research with HBS Assistant Professor Michael Luca and Daniel Svirsky, a doctoral student at HBS. “However, these features may also facilitate discrimination based on sellers' race, gender, age, or other characteristics.” 
 
 To test for racial discrimination among Airbnb hosts, the researchers created 20 faux Airbnb guest accounts, identical in all respects except for guest names. The names included ten meant to sound distinctively African-American (“LaTonya Robinson” and “Rasheed Jackson,” for example) and ten meant to sound white (e.g. “Laurie Ryan” and “Brent Baker”). These monikers, half male and half female, were chosen based on the frequency of names from birth certificates of babies born in Massachusetts in the mid-1970s. 
 
 Using these twenty guest accounts, the researchers sent some 6,400 rental inquiries to Airbnb hosts over a period of three weeks in July, 2015. Then they waited for responses from the hosts. They found that requests from guests with distinctively African-American-sounding names were decidedly less likely to be accepted than identical guests with white-sounding names. In their sample, hosts accepted inquiries from the white-sounding names 50 percent of the time. In contrast, guests with African-American-sounding names were accepted roughly 42 percent of the time. 
 
 This study followed a 2014 study in which Edelman and Luca found that black hosts charged approximately 12 percent less for rentals than nonblack hosts—even when the properties were equivalent in terms of location and quality. 
 
 So what can be done to prevent this apparent discrimination? In their paper “Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy,” the researchers note that the most obvious way to squelch racism on Airbnb is to squelch the ability to identify the race of guests or hosts online. To that end, they teamed up with two computer scientists to create a tool that does just that. 
 
 “Debias Yourself” is a downloadable browser plugin that lets an Airbnb host view a guest’s inquiry message, while hiding the guest’s profile picture and name. 
 
 “This way, the host can review and accept guest requests on a nondiscriminatory basis, considering a guest’s request on the merits (such as dates, number of people, and purpose of the visit) without information that conveys race, gender, or age (such as name and photograph). In future versions, we will add support for other online marketplaces,” the researchers write on the site debiasyourself.org. 
 
 The tool also allows guests to peruse potential rental properties without seeing profile pictures of the hosts. 
 
 Is it legal for the researchers to tamper with Airbnb like this? “We’re just changing the way your browser shows the Airbnb site – telling your browser not to show certain text and images,” they write. “That isn’t quite what Airbnb intended, but it’s your computer, and it’s your right to configure it as you see fit.” 
 
 Debias Yourself is available for download on Google’s Chrome Web Store. Currently it is available only for Chrome browsers, but there will be support for other browsers in the future, according to the researchers. There are also plans afoot to “debias” other online marketplaces, Edelman says. 
 
 Harvard Business School Working Knowledge offers an accessible look at the latest research and ideas from the faculty of Harvard Business School.
– Airbnb's commitment to building a connection between hosts and guests in the interest of safety is actually helping them discriminate against each other, the Washington Post reports. Harvard researchers sent out 6,400 requests to Airbnb hosts in Los Angeles, St. Louis, DC, Baltimore, and Dallas using fake accounts. The accounts were identical except for the names, which were either stereotypically white or black. The study —published Wednesday—found guests with "black" names were 16% less likely to be accepted. That's about the same level of discrimination found in everything from the job market to classified ad rates, the Post reports. "This is absolutely not a story about how people are bigots on Airbnb," study coauthor Michael Luca says. "This is entirely about the choices that online platforms make that either facilitate or prevent discrimination." Researchers found discrimination came from all hosts—black, white, female, male, expensive properties, cheap properties, etc. The Post reports the only exception was black female hosts, who didn't appear to discriminate against black female guests. According to the study, this discrimination came at a financial cost, as hosts who turned down guests only found replacements 35% of the time. But the researchers aren't just pointing out the problem, they're helping solve it. According to Forbes, they partnered with some computer scientists to create a downloadable tool called Debias Yourself. Airbnb users with Chrome can download the tool, and Debias Yourself will scrub the names and photos of hosts and guests from the site.