Ian Ayres, Situationist Contributor Mahzarin Banaji, and Christine Jolls recently posted their paper, titled “Race Effects on Ebay” on SSRN. Here’s the abstract.
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We investigate the impact of seller race in a field experiment involving baseball card auctions on eBay. Photographs showed the cards held by either a dark-skinned/African-American hand or a light-skinned/Caucasian hand. Cards held by African-American sellers sold for approximately 20% ($0.90) less than cards held by Caucasian sellers, and the race effect was more pronounced in sales of minority player cards. Our evidence of race differentials is important because the on-line environment is well controlled (with the absence of confounding tester effects) and because the results show that race effects can persist in a thick real-world market such as eBay.
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Download the paper for free here.
Related Situationist posts:
- The Situation of Retail Discrimination
- Racial Prejudice in Real Estate Markets,
- What Are the Legal Implications of Implicit Biases?
- Why Race May Influence Us Even When We “Know” It Doesn’t,
- Black History is Now,
- Jennifer Eberhardt’s “Policing Racial Bias” – Video,
- Unequal Juries
- Unconscious Racial Attitudes
- Race and Implicit American-ness
- Why Race May Influence Us Even When We “Know” It Doesn’t, and
- What Are the Legal Implications of Implicit Biases?.
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