Due to racial discrimination, white vacationers have an easier time booking an Airbnb rental property than African-Americans do, according to a new study from faculty at Harvard Business School.

The problem seems to lie in all the personal information—names and profile pictures—that are inherent in many online marketplaces of the so-called sharing economy. “To facilitate trust, many online platforms like Airbnb encourage sellers to provide personal profiles and even to post pictures of themselves” says HBS Associate Professor Ben Edelman, who conducted the research with HBS Assistant Professor Michael Luca and Daniel Svirsky, a doctoral student at HBS. “However, these features may also facilitate discrimination based on sellers' race, gender, age, or other characteristics.”

To test for racial discrimination among Airbnb hosts, the researchers created 20 faux Airbnb guest accounts, identical in all respects except for guest names. The names included ten meant to sound distinctively African-American (“LaTonya Robinson” and “Rasheed Jackson,” for example) and ten meant to sound white (e.g. “Laurie Ryan” and “Brent Baker”). These monikers, half male and half female, were chosen based on the frequency of names from birth certificates of babies born in Massachusetts in the mid-1970s.

Using these twenty guest accounts, the researchers sent some 6,400 to Airbnb hosts over a period of three weeks in July, 2015. Then they waited for responses from the hosts. They found that requests from guests with distinctively African-American-sounding names were decidedly less likely to be accepted than identical guests with white-sounding names. In their sample, hosts accepted inquiries from the white-sounding names 50 percent of the time. In contrast, guests with African-American-sounding names were accepted roughly 42 percent of the time.

This study followed a 2014 study in which Edelman and Luca found that black hosts charged approximately 12 percent less for rentals than nonblack hosts—even when the properties were equivalent in terms of location and quality.

So what can be done to prevent this apparent discrimination? In their paper “Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy,” the researchers note that the most obvious way to squelch racism on Airbnb is to squelch the ability to identify the race of guests or hosts online. To that end, they’ve teamed up with two computer scientists to create a tool that does just that.