
Racial and Gender Discrimination in Transportation Network Companies - dalek2point3
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22776
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nickff
The abstract states "[p]eer transportation companies such as Uber and Lyft
present the opportunity to rectify long-standing discrimination or worsen it",
but the study appears (from my quick glance) not to have directly compared
Uber, Lyft, and taxis with the same methodology. The (scant) evidence
regarding likely racial discrimination by taxis seems to indicate that Lyft
and Uber are much less discriminatory.

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tajen
That matches my intuitive opinion about it. And it only gets worse with the
sharing economy. As soon as you choose your peer, it introduced human
judgement.

One interesting thing would be to measure which race is the most racist, so we
can sensibilize the right population.

Another interesting thing would be to have objective metrics to judge whether
a transaction went well (whether the passenger was at the predefined location,
on time, and whether the car was used with care).

I'll say it: Sometimes racism is based on a correct evaluation of the risk. So
what can we do to diminish the risk?

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mrdmnd
Consider a world where you are assigned a random phrase (i.e. "Correct Horse
Battery Staple") when you request a ride. The driver is never shown a name.
When they are shown the set of people they could pick up, they are not shown a
photo or passphrase until they accept the ride. As soon as they accept your
ride, they are shown your passphrase and your photo (the former to ensure that
they are picking up the right passenger, and the latter to ensure that a
previously vetted passenger isn't cheating and providing their account to
someone else / buying a ride for someone else).

Wouldn't this go a pretty long way towards removing obvious sources of
discrimination?

~~~
drakonandor
Not letting the drivers see a location and trying to force them to drive into
ghettos where they might get carjacked will probably not go over too well,
especially with female drivers.

~~~
mrdmnd
I think this is absolutely true; and you'd want to show drivers locations - I
can't think of any way to obscure this, and it does leave a source for
discrimination ("don't drive into the dangerous neighborhoods").

I'm not sure I have any good solution to that particular problem, but surely
perfect is the enemy of good, and the human anonymization approach is
reasonable low hanging fruit?

~~~
drakonandor
I'm betting the location thing alone would still keep 99% of the present
discrimination.

At some point the question should probably change from

"How can we force Uber drivers to increase risk of losing well-being, wallet,
and car in the name of fairness to customers?"

to

"Why are these neighborhoods/people/demographic so scary to working class
citizens, and what can we do to fix it?"

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searine
Interesting, but the standard deviations of the metrics are as large or larger
than the mean in every case. Also, there is a lack of trend between
independent replicates.

So, very noisy data to say the least. I think their taxi figure in the
appendix highlights the problem of discrimination much more clearly than their
analysis of this dataset.

