While in the midst of preparing for my upcoming negotiation class on culture, gender and race, I ran across an interesting (and discouraging) empirical study looking at the impact of race on eBay auctions that was recently posted on SSRN. The article is “Race Effects on Ebay” by Ian Ayres, Mahzarin Banaji, and Christine Jolls. It is available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1934432 . The abstract states:

“We investigate the impact of seller race in a field experiment involving baseball card auctions on eBay. Photographs showed the cards held by either a dark-skinned/African-American hand or a light-skinned/Caucasian hand. Cards held by African-American sellers sold for approximately 20% ($0.90) less than cards held by Caucasian sellers, and the race effect was more pronounced in sales of minority player cards. Our evidence of race differentials is important because the on-line environment is well controlled (with the absence of confounding tester effects) and because the results show that race effects can persist in a thick real-world market such as eBay.”

Hat tip to the Empirical Legal Studies blog.