{"title":"EXPRESS: Racial Discrimination in Sourcing: Evidence from Controlled Experiments","authors":"K. Aral, L. V. Van Wassenhove","doi":"10.1177/10591478241238984","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":4,"journal":{"name":"ACS Applied Energy Materials","volume":"25 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.4000,"publicationDate":"2024-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"ACS Applied Energy Materials","FirstCategoryId":"91","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/10591478241238984","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"材料科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"CHEMISTRY, PHYSICAL","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
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.
期刊介绍:
ACS Applied Energy Materials is an interdisciplinary journal publishing original research covering all aspects of materials, engineering, chemistry, physics and biology relevant to energy conversion and storage. The journal is devoted to reports of new and original experimental and theoretical research of an applied nature that integrate knowledge in the areas of materials, engineering, physics, bioscience, and chemistry into important energy applications.