‘Heart of Atlanta Motel’ can help navigate sharing economy discrimination issues
How might a landmark civil rights case from 1964 from Atlanta be of interest to Airbnb today?
That year Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which included a prohibition on segregated public spaces including hotels/motels. The Heart of Atlanta Motel in Atlanta, GA decided nope — we’re not going to follow this Civil Rights Act. Not for us. They continued to only rent rooms to white patrons, the US government sued, and the US Supreme Court decided against the motel requiring they offer accommodations irrespective of ethnicity.
Why is this relevant to sharing economy companies today? This is a case about discrimination, but it’s also about the tradeoff between an individual’s right to decide with whom to associate in business and life versus a society’s goal to allow people irrespective of demographic characteristics like race or gender to be full economic and social participants.
I thought of this case when Angeli Jain visited our Reputation Management class at Stanford GSB to talk about trust and reputation in the sharing economy. Our discussion turned to some of the issues Airbnb faced in preventing discrimination from creeping into their platform. According to Jain, Airbnb builds its products promoting five pillars:
- Safety
- Security
- Fairness
- Authenticity
- Reliability
To promote fairness, Airbnb has worked to stem discrimination by hosts/guests by writing a non-discrimination policy that Airbnb users must agree to, running experiments on how to design to reduce discrimination on the platform, and much more. These are great steps.
However, what I wish we’d hear more of is how when those principles are in conflict, how does Airbnb resolve that issue? For example, it encourages hosts and guests to each fill out a complete public profile including names, photos, bios, and other data points. I definitely feel more secure knowing some of the details of my host, especially if I’m going to share an apartment with them. But, a 2017 paper by three HBS faculty concluded (emphasis added):
…applications from guests with distinctively African-American names are 16% less likely to be accepted relative to identical guests with distinctively White names. Discrimination occurs among landlords of all sizes, including small landlords sharing the property and larger landlords with multiple properties. It is most pronounced among hosts who have never had an African-American guest, suggesting only a subset of hosts discriminate. While rental markets have achieved significant reductions in discrimination in recent decades, our results suggest that Airbnb’s current design choices facilitate discrimination and raise the possibility of erasing some of these civil rights gains.
Damn. Irrespective of whether this is an implicit or explicit bias, that’s a pretty big impact of for your name.
I love the ideas behind “Belong anywhere” (Airbnb), “Transportation as reliable as running water, everywhere and for everyone” (Uber), or “Reconnect people through transportation and bring communities together” (Lyft). Each of these visions is ambitious, lofty, and can really improve how humans live their lives. I think these companies and the people in them are well-meaning, truly trying to build something closer to those vision. But if we’re using such lofty language, we too need to be clear where we’re choosing between individual and group rights. Discrimination has been an issue across many sharing economy platforms. Let’s call out the tradeoffs directly to make everyone able to join these platforms.
I don’t think the product solutions will be easy or obvious, but the culture to experiment is a real tool here: hard data can have significant value to understand how we’re actually balancing those values. One tangible experiment for the security vs. fairness issues at Airbnb: perhaps we show specific profile information most likely to trigger implicit biases after booking but before arrival.
I’m sure there are many other ways. Let’s explore those ideas explicitly.
