In order to reduce the number of instances of discrimination in its marketplace, Luca said Airbnb might replace a host’s profile picture with a word cloud of personal characteristics or move the picture to a less prominent position on the listing page.

“There are examples of successful platforms such as eBay that don't contain pictures of the person who is trying to sell you a good,” he said. “We don’t see any immediate reason why you need a picture to facilitate a transaction.”

In the future, Luca and Edelman aspire to work directly with platforms, including Airbnb, to develop mechanisms to minimize discrimination in online market transactions.

Regardless of Airbnb’s design decisions, the consideration of racial issues in an array of online platforms is becoming more and more necessary as society is uploaded to the internet, Martin said.

“People are replicating society online in important ways, and, because racism exists in offline society, it very naturally extends to social uses in digital spaces,” she said. “Dealing with race is an increasingly important issue that these social media sites have to face—in addition to gender, ethnicity, and other social differences.”

—Staff Writer Alexander H. Patel can be reached at alexanderpatel@college.harvard.edu