Reputation offsets trust judgments based on social biases among Airbnb users

Significance We investigate the extent to which artificial features engineered by sharing-economy platforms, such as reputation systems, can be used to override people’s tendency to base judgments of trustworthiness on social biases, such as to trust others who are similar (i.e., homophily). To this end, we engaged 8,906 users of Airbnb as volunteers in an online experiment. We demonstrate that homophily based on several demographic...