This blog has been cross-posted from theSpringerOpen blog

Sharing Economy platforms such as Uber and Airbnb have grown exponentially in the last few years. These platforms often pride themselves for providing less advantaged people with opportunities to earn extra income, for promoting an egalitarian system that rewards users for the quality of the services they offer, and for championing diversity by favoring interactions between different cultures.

Do Sharing Economy platforms really promote diversity and inclusiveness? Or do they instead act as big online aggregators of well known “offline” human biases?

不过，这不是完整的故事。最近，共享经济平台因其用户之间的歧视性行为而受到抨击。例如，研究表明，非裔美国人使用者更有可能在Airbnb上对Uber和预订的乘车请求取消。此外，经常被指控加速在大城市中已经进展顺利的绅士化现象，并且通常与已经存在的种族鸿沟保持一致。

In the study recently published inEPJ Data Science, we set out to conducta large-scale investigation of the Sharing Economyin order to see what narrative is actually supported by empirical evidence. Do Sharing Economy platforms really promote diversity and inclusiveness? Or do they instead act as big online aggregators of well known “offline” human biases?

我们收集了来自世界不同大陆五个主要城市的Airbnb预订历史。从这些信息中，我们通过面部识别和注释软件提取了有关用户的性别，年龄和种族的信息，从而收集了这些城市中Airbnb用户群的人口统计信息。我们进一步绘制了客人与主机的住在一起的内容，从而建立了可用于分析的互动网络。

The results show that Airbnb’s user base is predominantly female and – unsurprisingly – young. What is instead surprising is that the community is overwhelmingly white, even in cities with a markedly diverse racial makeup. For example, roughly 60% of Airbnb hosts were found to be white in Hong Kong, a city whose population is 92% Chinese Asian according to the latest census. Similarly, we found more than 90% of Airbnb properties to be owned by white hosts in racially diverse American cities such as Chicago and Nashville, where the African-American population is around 30%.

Airbnb社区绝大多数是白人，即使在各种种族化妆的城市中也是如此。

我们还研究了不同用户组之间的相互作用频率，并将其与随机的主机匹配中的预期频率进行了比较。这允许确定互动的实际模式与如果主机和客人在预订之前无法了解彼此的性别或种族的情况之间发生的偏差。我们发现统计证据表明，在性别和种族方面，Airbnb使用者倾向于对类似的人（一种称为同性恋的行为）偏爱。对称地，也有证据表明，不同性别和种族之间预订的预期频率要低。

有证据表明，不同性别和种族之间的预订频率低于预期的频率。

The above findings show that the Sharing Economy user base is not as diverse as advertised, and that the wealth generated by the platforms tends to benefit richer communities, exacerbating preexisting economic and racial inequalities in major cities. Furthermore, Sharing Economy platforms cannot eliminate the offline biases that so often plague face-to-face interactions, and targeted interventions are needed to prevent them from taking place. In this respect, Airbnb’s “instant booking” option, where a guest’s request is automatically accepted by the platform, without an explicit consent action from the host, has been an exemplary step in the right direction.