Airbnb hosts of Asian descent had significantly fewer stays early in the COVID-19 pandemic—and the design of the travel site may have inadvertently enabled discrimination that shut Asians out, says new research by Harvard Business Professor Michael Luca.
Hosts with Asian names in the US saw bookings drop by an estimated 12 percent in the time period studied compared to white, Black, or Hispanic hosts—just one way that Asians experienced broad discrimination after the pandemic’s origins in China were politicized, finds a new working paper coauthored by Luca.
The research documents a financial consequence of the “scapegoating” that can happen whenever a crisis gets blamed on a particular group. The most troubling aspect of the phenomenon, Luca says, is that the discrimination could have to some extent been avoided if the platform didn’t prominently showcase the names and photos of hosts.
“In times of crisis, when tensions are running high and discrimination is spiking in the world around us, you're going to be more susceptible to it if you're a platform that has decided to have a design that enables it,” says Luca, who coauthored the working paper with Elizaveta Pronkina, a post-doctoral researcher at the Université Paris-Dauphine, and Michelangelo Rossi, assistant professor at Télécom Paris.
In a political environment where racial injustice draws plenty of attention from all sides, companies that want to lead on the issue need to pay close attention to the inequities that they may inadvertently exacerbate. While Airbnb has addressed bias concerns with site changes in the past, further steps could be taken to bring more anonymity to the site, Luca says.
Platform design and discrimination
Renting out properties to travelers on Airbnb has become an important source of income for many people. During 2021, as travel resumed, Airbnb hosts collectively earned $34 billion across 6 million active listings.
One possible reason that Airbnb prominently features the names and faces of hosts on its site is to engender trust between guests and hosts. The company currently provides accommodations in more than 220 countries and 100,000 cities. But when it first started out in 2008, it was competing with large and trusted hotel chains, and displaying pictures of hosts may have seemed like a good way to emphasize the non-corporate, folksy feel of an Airbnb stay, Luca says.
But there’s a flaw, he points out: “The risk is that you're enabling a type of discrimination that wouldn't have been possible on platforms where that information is not quite so front and center.”
Luca and colleagues analyzed 17,748 hosts and 334,906 reviews in New York City, one of Airbnb’s major markets. Using reviews as a proxy for bookings, the researchers tracked reviews for the year before and the year after the pandemic began. They turned to NamePrism, a publicly available algorithm identifying the likelihood of a name belonging to a certain ethnicity to isolate distinctively Asian names.
Because most guests leave reviews, the researchers say they can accurately reflect the number of bookings a host is getting. The researchers then compared the change in the number of reviews for Asian hosts to the change in the number of reviews for non-Asian hosts.
All hosts experienced a decline in stays in that first year of the pandemic, as travel around the world declined. But Airbnb hosts with distinctively Asian names were markedly more impacted: These hosts experienced an additional 12 percent drop in bookings during the early months of the pandemic compared to other hosts in New York City. The drop in reviews for Asian hosts began in the spring of 2020 and remained low through November 2020.
Scapegoating during the pandemic
Reports of racially motivated violence and discrimination against Asian-Americans have been well-documented by law enforcement groups, advocacy organizations, and public surveys in the United States since COVID-19 upended the world in 2020.
In March of 2020, then-President Donald Trump dubbed COVID-19 “the Chinese virus” in a speech and used other terms like “the Wuhan virus” and “Kung Flu” that were parroted by conservative pundits and in social memes. According to a Pew Research Center survey, almost half of Asian-American adults reported experiencing at least one racist incident in the first year of the pandemic.
The scapegoating of Asian-Americans during the pandemic reflects a pattern that commonly arises when nations are confronted with a crisis, say the researchers. After World War II, discrimination against Japanese-Americans drove many Japanese to Americanize their children’s names. And after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Muslims and Middle-Easterners experienced rampant discrimination and sometimes physical violence.
In that context, what happened on Airbnb in 2020 may be disturbing, but it’s not entirely surprising, Luca says.
“Given the scapegoating that we've seen both within government and in society at large, we worried discrimination may also spike on the platform,” he says. “More than surprised, I was saddened by it.”
Companies can prevent bias
This is not the first time Luca’s research has looked at Airbnb’s platform design. In 2014, Luca’s research revealed that displaying guest profile photos before a host accepted a booking request resulted in fewer bookings of guests of color. In 2018, Airbnb announced it would no longer display guest photos prior to the acceptance of a booking request—a proposal that Luca had made two years earlier. Airbnb also reduced the prominence of host photos, removing them from the main search results page, though they left host photos on the listing pages.
In June 2020, Airbnb launched Project Lighthouse, a US-based research effort that aims to identify and measure bias involving names and photos to help the company create better policies, building on many of the ideas Luca has proposed over the years. While the company admits the project won’t end prejudice on its platform, “it’s an important step that can identify discrimination that would otherwise go undetected,” according to Airbnb’s website. The company has removed 1.5 million people from its community for discriminatory behavior.
Luca says the experience at Airbnb provides an important lesson for other businesses with similar web platforms. Companies should be reviewing their web design and building in more anonymity. If it’s necessary to provide identifying information of users, he suggests waiting until a transaction is complete.
“Every platform should be thinking about this issue,” says Luca. “Every platform needs to be tracking for bias. Every platform needs to be transparent about when and where it's occurring and transparent about what steps they're taking to reduce it.”
One of the most important takeaways, according to Luca, is that business leaders need to accept the responsibility of creating a more inclusive society. When they ignore the potential for bias, they may inadvertently harm their customers, he says. Luca has been contacted by Airbnb about this research, and by other business leaders looking to create more inclusive ecosystems.
“There's discrimination in the world,” he says. Luca has a simple message for business leaders: “As a leader, you should be thinking about how discrimination affects your business and how you could approach it. You can't just sit on the sidelines and say, ‘Well, that’s society, it’s not my problem.’ It is your problem as a leader. You need to take steps to make sure you're contributing to solutions rather than to problems.”
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Feedback or ideas to share? Email the Working Knowledge team at hbswk@hbs.edu.
Image: iStockphoto/xijian