Two experiments in a new working paper find some evidence that some drivers using popular ride-hailing platforms discriminate against riders. In some cases African-American riders faced longer wait times or higher probabilities of having a driver cancel on them. To some extent, these findings should temper hopes that these new technologies and platforms would succeed in quickly rooting out these forms of discrimination. It is important to note, however, that this study examined whether there was discrimination within these platforms, it did not compare ride-hailing platforms and traditional taxi companies. These new platforms do offer some advantages over the status quo when it comes to identifying the channels of discrimination through richer data, while the rating system gives riders some recourse to penalize discriminating drivers and an incentive for drivers to maintain a high rating.
In the study the researchers undertook two large-scale experiments to try to determine whether there was a pattern of discrimination for riders using these ride-hailing platforms.