Do Workers Discriminate against Their Out-group Employers? Evidence from the Gig Economy

Arbeitspapier

We study possible worker-to-employer discrimination manifested via social preferences in an online labor market. Specifically, we ask, do workers exhibit positive social preferences for an out-race employer relative to an otherwise-identical, own-race one? We run a well-powered, model-based experiment wherein we recruit 6,000 workers from Amazon's M-Turk platform for a real-effort task and randomly (and unobtrusively) reveal to them the racial identity of their non-fictitious employer. Strikingly, we find strong evidence of race-based altruism – white workers, even when they do not benefit personally, work relatively harder to generate more income for black employers. Self-declared white Republicans and Independents exhibit significantly more altruism relative to Democrats. Notably, the altruism does not seem to be driven by race-specific beliefs about the income status of the employers. Our results suggest the possibility that pro-social behavior of whites toward blacks, atypical in traditional labor markets, may emerge in the gig economy where associative (dis)taste is naturally muted due to limited social contact.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 13012

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Labor Discrimination ; Micro-Based Behavioral Economics: Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making‡ ; Field Experiments
• Subject: discrimination ; worker-to-employer ; social preferences ; taste-based discrimination ; Gig Economy ; mechanical turk ; Structural Behavioral Economics

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Asad, Sher Afghan ; Banerjee, Ritwik ; Bhattacharya, Joydeep
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
• (where): Bonn
• (when): 2020

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/216324
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:41 AM CET