Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future

by Andrew McAfee

Airbnb CEO and cofounder Joe Gebbia refers to this system of peer reviews and ratings as “design for trust” and highlights another of its benefits: it can help us overcome our personal biases. We’re sure that most Airbnb hosts don’t consider themselves racist, but the company’s data show that, on average, hosts are slightly less willing to rent out to minority guests than to white ones.¶ However, this effect reverses itself for minority guests with a good overall rating and more than ten reviews. Prospective hosts are actually more likely to rent to such guests than to white ones without many ratings. “High reputation beats high similarity,” as Gebbia puts it; his company has found that its platform’s user interface and user experience “can actually help us overcome one of our most deeply rooted biases—the ‘stranger-danger’ bias.”