Machine Learning algorithms are becoming widely deployed in real world decision-making. Ensuring fairness in algorithmic decision-making is a crucial policy issue. Current legislation ensures fairness by barring algorithm designers from using demographic information in their decision-making. As...

We study the effect of Airbnb’s smart-pricing algorithm on the racial disparity in the daily revenue earned by Airbnb hosts. Our empirical strategy exploits Airbnb’s introduction of the algorithm and its voluntary adoption by hosts as a quasi-natural experiment. Among those who adopted the...