Who Gets the Lion’s Share in the Sharing Economy: A case study of social inequality in AirBnB Afra Mashhadi 1 and Clovis Chapman 2 1 University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA mashhadi@uw.edu 2 University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6EA, UK c.chapman@cs.ucl.ac.uk Abstract. Sharing economy platforms have rapidly disrupted and transformed many traditional markets. Companies such as AirBnB, in the housing market, and Uber, in the ride-sharing space, have thrived by creating opportunities for so-called “micro-entrepreneurs”, allowing them to leverage existing personal as- sets, such as a spare room or car, to generate additional income. While often heralded as an opportunity to reduce income inequality, opening opportunities through technology to a much larger segment of the population, there is however a latent concern that these platforms are in practice not as inclusive as advertised. In this paper we study the AirBnB listings in Chicago and examine a number of different dimensions regarding the hosts, their property and the environment within which they operate. Specifically we examine who the hosts are by de- tecting hosts’ ethnicity, gender and age using images posted publicly on the site. Leveraging this information and socio-economic metrics from the Census, we ex- amine the properties different hosts offer and what is received in return. Finally we study how these hosts present their properties by measuring the aesthetic score of the main listing photographs using a deep learning algorithm. Our results sug- gest an ethnical discrepancy that affects minorities from lower socio-economic backgrounds, even when taking into account location and other attributes such as price of AirBnB listings. The findings also suggest that a wider range of factors, such as poorer pictures of listings, maybe affecting the inclusion and that could be corrected with internal policies and assistance of the platform owners. Introduction Sharing Economy platforms provide services and connections between individuals with under-utilized tangible assets such as a car or a house, and other individuals or busi- nesses in need of those assets [8, 25]. In the past years, these platforms have become extremely popular as they offer to increase consumer welfare by opening up competi- tion in an increasingly large variety of domains [24]. Indeed some speculators including Milbourn [16] and Nunberg [19] widely believe that the sharing economy will substan- tially displace traditional equivalents in the future. Despite this promise, the sharing economy raises important concerns regarding socio-economic inequality, manifested as age and racial discrimination. A recent study of Uber, the ride sharing platform, showed that African-american passengers were sub- ject to longer waits [9]. Similarly, a field study of AirBnB has shown that guests with