Racial Discrimination in Sourcing: Evidence From Controlled Experiments
通过控制实验发现，供应商销售经理的名字若听起来像黑人，买家选择该供应商的概率会降低6.5%，表明采购决策中存在种族歧视，可能需类似劳动市场的平等机会立法。
Entrepreneurial activity is widely seen as an important tool for addressing the racial wealth gap. However, the survival of minority-owned businesses depends on their ability to win contracts from buyer firms—which might be impacted by buyers’ racial biases. Whether discrimination can exist in sourcing and affect this ability is an unexplored question, perhaps due to an implicit assumption that business-to-business settings are immune from discriminatory biases. In this paper, we use controlled experiments to study whether racial discrimination can affect sourcing decisions. We find that when a supplier's sales manager has a distinctively Black name, buyers are 6.5% less likely (statistically significant at 1% level) to select that supplier compared to a supplier with a sales manager with a distinctively white name. Our findings suggest that equal-opportunity legislation similar to that already in place in the labor market may be needed in the sourcing context. Our findings have implications for executives, suggesting that supplier diversity programs and procurement-bias training can boost corporate performance by expanding the supplier pool, and simultaneously enhance a firm's corporate social responsibility profile.