Research On Factors Of Racial Prejudice In Online Housing Sharing Platform

In the United States,which is known as the global ethnic melting pot,Airbnb occupies the highest housing sharing market.House renting happens possibly between unfamiliar landlords and tenants with different skin colors.In recent years,racial prejudice on Airbnb has appeared in newspapers.A series of studies have shown that racial prejudice will damage huge potential income and opportunity for the landlords,tenants and the Airbnb platform.According to the relevant theories of racial prejudice(similar attraction,tasted-based discrimination,statistical-based discrimination),this study concludes the causes of racial prejudice(trust,perceived risk,lack of information)and the factors that may reduce racial prejudice(reputation,self-disclosure),then makes use of 8,233 rental records in six American cities on Airbnb during 2019 to build relevant hypotheses and models about the influence of user reputation and self-disclosure on the level of prejudice.Statistical and text analysis methods is used to carry out empirical research.The main conclusions of this paper are listed as follows:(1)The existence of racial prejudice on Airbnb is verified by chisquare test.For landlords from different racial groups,the proportion of tenant racial groups shows preference of same race.(2)The effect of Airbnb users’ reputation and self-disclosure on reducing the level of prejudice is verified by regression analysis.(3)Some semantic topics extracted from Airbnb users’ text information(comments and self-descriptions)may help to alleviate prejudice.Finally,based on the research conclusion,this paper provides suggestions for Airbnb users to eliminate the negative impact of prejudice,which is helpful for Airbnb landlords from different ethnic groups to get a fair income and tenants to have a similar probability to book houses successfully.Therefore,it will improve the Airbnb user experience and bring more profits to Airbnb platform.