Which Information Matters? Measuring Landlord Assessment of Tenant Screening Reports

Abstract

This research studies how tenant screening services’ presentation ofinformation influences landlord decisions. Tenant screening services util-ize criminal records, eviction records, and credit score databases to pro-duce reports that landlords use to inform their decisions about who torent to. However, little is known about how landlords assess the infor-mation presented by tenant screening reports. Through a behavioralexperiment with landlords using simulated tenant screening reports,this study shows that landlords use blanket screening policies, that theyconflate the existence of tenant records with outcomes (e.g., eviction fil-ings with executed evictions), and that they display, on average, tenden-cies toward automation bias that are influenced by the risk assessmentsand scores presented by tenant screening reports. I argue that maintain-ing blanket screening policies and automation bias, combined with thedownstream effects of creating and using racially biased eviction andcriminal records, means that people of color will inevitably experiencedisproportionate exclusion from rental housing due to perceived “risk”on the part of landlords.