Rodríguez-Menés, JorgeGonzález López, María José, 1966-Cortina Trilla, Clara2025-09-302025-09-302025Rodríguez-Menés J, González MJ, Cortina C. When your name matters: two field experiments on ethnic discrimination in Spain’s main online consumer-to-consumer market. Soc Indic Res. 2025 Jul 16. DOI: 10.1007/s11205-025-03672-00303-8300http://hdl.handle.net/10230/71308Data de publicació electrònica: 16-07-2025Understanding ethnic discrimination is essential for effective policymaking in multicultural societies like Spain, where the foreign-born population has grown significantly. This study examines ethnic discrimination in one of Spain’s largest online consumer-to-consumer (C2C) markets through two field experiments. The results reveal that buyers with Arabic or Chinese names face discrimination compared to those with Spanish names, but only when they bid at the listed price. In contrast, sellers do not experience similar bias, regardless of the price at which they mark their products. These findings align with the “second-moment” theory of statistical discrimination, which argues that bias arises not from prejudice against minorities or stereotypes about their abilities but from a lack of familiarity with minorities in traditional buyer roles. Sellers’ discriminatory behavior appears tied to their perception of risk: they are more likely to discriminate against minorities when aiming to minimize potential losses in favorable sales. Conversely, they show a preference for minorities when seeking to maximize gains in less-than-optimal transactions.application/pdfengThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11205-025-03672-0Ethnic discriminationTaste discriminationFirst-moment statistical discriminationSecond-moment statistical discriminationField experimentSpainSecond-hand commodity marketsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess