Super Crunchers by Ian Ayres

Author:Ian Ayres
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780553904130
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-08-27T16:00:00+00:00

From 90 to 3,000,000

The increase in accessibility to digitalized data has been a part of my own life. Way back in 1989 when I had just started teaching, I sent six testers out to Chicagoland new car dealerships to see if dealers discriminated against women or minorities. I trained the testers to follow a uniform script that told them how to bargain for a car. The testers even had uniform answers to any questions the salesman might ask (including “I’m sorry but I’m not comfortable answering that”). The testers walked alike, talked alike. They were similar on every dimension I could think of except for their race and sex. Half the testers were white men and half were either women or African-Americans. Just like a classic fair housing test, I wanted to see if women or minorities were treated differently than white men.

They were. White women had to pay 40 percent higher markups than white men; black men had to pay more than twice the markup, and black women had to pay more than three times the markup of white male testers. My testers were systematically steered to salespeople of their own race and gender (who then gave them worse deals).

The study got a lot of press when it was published in the Harvard Law Review. Primetime Live filmed three different episodes testing whether women and minorities were treated equally not just at car dealerships but at a variety of retail establishments. A lot of people were disturbed by film clips of shoe clerks who forced black customers to wait and wait for service even though no one else was in the store. More importantly, the study played a small role in pushing the retail industry toward no-haggle purchasing.

A few years after my study, Saturn decided to air a television commercial that was centrally about Saturn’s unwillingness to discriminate. The commercial was composed entirely of a series of black-and-white photographs. In a voiceover narrative, an African-American man recalls his father returning home after purchasing a car and feeling that he had been mistreated by the salesman. The narrator then says maybe that’s why he feels good about having become a salesperson for Saturn. The commercial is a remarkable piece of rhetoric. The stark photographic images are devoid of the smiles that normally populate car advertisements. Instead there is a heartrending shot of a child realizing that his father has been mistreated because of their shared race and the somber but firmly proud shot of the grown, grim-faced man now having taken on the role of a salesman who does not discriminate. The commercial does not explicitly mention race or Saturn’s no-haggle policy—but few viewers would fail to understand that race was a central cause of the father’s mistreatment.

The really important point is that all this began with six testers bargaining at just ninety dealerships. While I ultimately did a series of follow-up studies analyzing the results of hundreds of additional bargains, the initial uproar came from a very small study. Why so small? It’s hard to remember, but this was back in the day before the Internet.

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