Examining discrimination in everyday life: a stated choice experiment on racism in the sharing economy

ABSTRACT

Prejudice and discrimination in everyday life are persistent problems for most societies but difficult to uncover and explain by empirical social research. Complementing existing approaches to study discrimination, we demonstrate the usefulness of survey-based stated choice experiments to explore everyday discrimination and its heterogeneity within a multifactorial framework. In our study German respondents (n = 766) were asked to choose between various carpooling offers varying not only in regard to price, car type, and rating but also to the perceived ethnic background of the driver. Random parameter logit models show preference heterogeneity in the sample and that differences in choice behaviour related to perceived ethnic background of the driver can be explained by xenophobic attitudes and lack of regular contact with perceived ‘foreigners’. We find no indication that familiarity with the situation reduces discriminatory preferences. Our survey-based approach adds to existing research by experimentally singling out main and interactions effects of discriminatory attributes and by being able to determine the correlation between personal characteristics of the decision makers and their discriminatory preferences.

KEYWORDS:

• Discrimination
• racism
• xenophobia
• contact hypothesis
• stated choice experiment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 A search in the Web of Science of the topic ‘choice experiment’ in July 2019 produced 4,937 hits, most of which were economic applications. There are less than ten applications with a sociological focus (see also Auspurg and Hinz 2015b).

2 Actually, the label ‘Turkish’ can be considered as a pars pro toto for the broader group of Arab/Turkish/ Persian immigrants since there seems to be no specific pattern for each of these subgroups which are mostly equated by Germans who do not belong to this group.

3 Confidence intervals for the premium – mean marginal willingness-to-pay estimates – were calculated using the Krinsky and Robb bootstrapping procedure with 2000 repetitions.