Can Emma and Lukas charge more than Mohammed and Aisha on Airbnb? Exploring ethnicity- and gender-based discrimination on Airbnb in Germany

Abstract: In recent years the peer-to-peer accommodation-sharing platform Airbnb has been growing tremendously. One key driver for growth has been the increased establishment of trust, which, however, also facilitated discrimination through the exposure of more personal data. As the growth trend is continuing, it is important to understand the extent of discrimination, so that, if needed, counteracting measures can be introduced. Previous discrimination research about Airbnb has mainly focused on the US and did not base its studies on an underlying theory. We faced these two gaps by focusing on Germany and introducing social identity theory as the underlying concept, which explains discrimination through the existence of in- and out-groups. We programmed a web crawler that collected data of more than 76,000 Airbnb listings from the 82 largest cities in Germany and ran several OLS regressions. We find that females charge 0.58% less than males and Muslims 1.17% more than Non-Muslims. We conclude that the magnitude of the discrimination is practically spoken rather low as compared to past research (differences of up to 20%) as well as considered in absolute terms (around $1). Moreover, we found that in- and out-groups do not exist, which is in line with the low magnitude of discrimination. We conclude that our study supports the applicability of social identity theory, but further research is needed in order to test the theory in greater detail.