Equality in the Digital World: LSU Faculty Develop Software to Combat Discrimination

Over the past few years, Sharing Economy (SE) services such as Uber, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit have become a main facilitator of economic growth and shared prosperity in modern-day societies.Though this form of direct business exchange has been linked to significant levels of economic growth, especially in communities at the lower end of the economic ladder, recent research has exposed a serious discrimination problem affecting these platforms called digital discrimination. LSU Computer Science and Engineering Associate Professor Nash Mahmoud and LSU School of Social Work Associate Professor Michelle Livermore propose a first-of-its-kind conceptual framework for modeling and countering discrimination in the SE market.