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Crowd-Based Markets: Technical Progress, Civil and Social Regression

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Race in the Marketplace

Abstract

Crowd-based marketplaces facilitate peer-to-peer transactions across a variety of industries such as ride-sharing and crowdfunding. Because of their business model, crowd-based markets encourage users to share information as a means to promote trust and ultimately fuel transactions. To that end, crowd-based markets create technical designs to encourage transparency and those technical elements also introduce racial identity into the platform. This chapter discusses racial disparities in crowd-based markets and describes the economic implications of these disparities. Although crowd-based platforms can enact changes to lower racial bias, such as automated decision-making, the platforms’ economic incentives and values contradict with enforcement of self-regulatory anti-discrimination measures. As the global economy shifts toward more crowd-based solutions, the influence of crowd-based markets extends beyond their user base. Society should act to promote anti-discrimination protections in these crowd-based markets, and there is a call to action at the end of this chapter for governments, platforms, and citizens. Plus, this chapter contributes to the growing call to examine the values embedded in technology instead of viewing technology as “values neutral.”

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Business, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC, USA

    Lauren Rhue

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  1. Lauren Rhue
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Correspondence to Lauren Rhue .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Université Paris-Dauphine, Paris, France

    Guillaume D. Johnson

  2. Diederich College of Communication, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, USA

    Kevin D. Thomas

  3. Department of Sociology, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

    Anthony Kwame Harrison

  4. Kogod School of Business, American University, Washington, DC, USA

    Sonya A. Grier

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Rhue, L. (2019). Crowd-Based Markets: Technical Progress, Civil and Social Regression. In: Johnson, G., Thomas, K., Harrison, A., Grier, S. (eds) Race in the Marketplace. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11711-5_12

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