Discrimination in second hand consumer marketsevidence from a field experiment

Abstract

This paper studies discrimination against immigrants in the consumer market in Spain. We send emails of fictitious buyers to a popular Spanish second hand market webpage similar to ebay. Sellers are approached randomly by buyers with Spanish native or foreign sounding names to signal their ethnic origin. We find that those buyers with a foreign sounding name are contacted around 7.8 percentage points less than those with a Spanish sounding name. We then turn to explore how the price of the advertised good influences the degree of discrimination against foreign sounding names. We find that differential treatment across names occurs with more intensity for cheaper goods.