Race and Rating on Sharing Economy Platforms: The Effect of Race Similarity and Reputation on Trust and Booking Intention in Airbnb

Stories about the “sharing economy” are increasingly making the headlines in the media and research. While the sharing economy is booming and attractive, research has found evidence of racial discrimination on these sharing economy platforms. To begin to address this issue, this research in-progress paper proposes a theoretical model to examine the effects of racial similarity and ratings on an accommodation-sharing platform, Airbnb. We also propose a 2 (the racial origins of the guest and host are the same vs. different) × 2 (high vs. low reputation) between-subjects experiment to test the model. Then, we discuss the implementation of the experiment followed by a brief discussion of the study’s potential theoretical contributions.