Bori Simonovits

• PhD in Sociology, AMA in Social Policy Analysis
• Senior Lecturer at Eötvös Loránd University

The number of sharing economy platforms are rapidly growing worldwide, especially peer-to-peer (P2P) online marketplaces operating in the travel and tourism industry. We focus our attention on a Hungarian ridesharing platform in order to understand the working mechanisms of discriminative selection by service providers against service users of vari...

How can we reduce discrimination against ethnic minorities without the support of public institutions and state policies? In this article we describe the results of an intervention targeted to reduce discrimination against Roma people in Hungary in the context of rental housing. In collaboration with an online platform for home rental, we tested th...

Exploring the reasons behind people’s migration decisions has always been a core topic of migration studies. However, there is little scientific information on Iranian citizens’ migration plans; therefore, this study aims to fill this research gap. Our goal is to explore the main factors that push people to leave Iran, their reasons for seeking a n...

The aim of our study is to assess the drivers of discriminatory behaviors of real-estate agents and private landlords toward prospective Roma tenants, relying on qualitative data from Hungary. Though there is a broad literature on the forms and frequency of discrimination, we know much less about the question of why people discriminate . Previous r...

Due to its underregulated nature, the rapidly growing sharing economy can be a breeding ground for group-based disparities. Here we investigate discrimination on a leading Hungarian carpooling app against members of the two largest minority groups in the European Union: the Roma (numbering 6 million) and the disabled (numbering 100 million). In a f...

In our study we assess the responsiveness of Hungarian local governments to requests for information by Roma and non-Roma clients, relying on a nationwide correspondence study. Our paper has both methodological and substantive relevance. The methodological novelty is that we treat discrimination as a classification problem and study to what extent...

We analysed determinants of willingness to help using a factorial survey approach (n=405 individuals, n=5937 vignettes). We tested the effect of situational characteristics and how characteristics of the bystander and the person in need influence willingness to help in hypothetical situations within the framework of a cost-reward model. We found th...

This note explores discrimination against ethnic minorities in the new platform economy. Using experiments fielded in collaboration with a Hungarian car-sharing platform we demonstrate that contrary to the conventional wisdom, Roma users are discriminated even when positive reviews are available. Through a collaborative effort with the platform spa...

This open access book considers the development of the sharing and collaborative economy with a European focus, mapping across economic sectors, and country-specific case studies. It looks at the roles the sharing economy plays in sharing and redistribution of goods and services across the population in order to maximise their functionality, moneta...

The chapter is the final one in the volume of collected papers aiming to discuss the sharing economy in Europe. The idea of the book emerged within the research network created by the COST Action CA16121 ‘From Sharing to Caring: Examining Socio-Technical Aspects of the Collaborative Economy.’ The authors of the chapter sum up theoretical and empiri...

This chapter explains the rationale behind the book. It provides basic definitions of the concept of the sharing economy as well as the primary meanings related to the subject of the analysis undertaken in the subsequent chapters. This Introduction also includes a description of the main benefits of the analysis of the sharing economy from a Europe...

The chapter explores a broad dimensionality of experiences, learnings, challenges, and potential pathways of the sharing economy in food supply chains. Through technology-enabled business applications, the mobilisation of underutilised assets has been successfully facilitated in the foodservice industry. Community-based models have been relying on...

Understanding the irregular migrants’ motivations for leaving their country of origin and their experiences in the host country have always been seen as an important topic in the field of migration studies. However, there is currently a gap in the literature on this subject area especially in the case of Iranian asylum seekers in Europe. Therefore,...

The book titled The Collaborative Economy in Action: European Perspectives is one of the important outcomes of the COST Action CA16121, From Sharing to Caring: Examining the Socio-Technical Aspects of the Collaborative Economy (short name: Sharing and Caring; sharingandcaring.eu) that was active between March 2017 and September 2021. The Action was...

To what extent can civil rights NGOs protect ethnic minorities against unequal treatment? We study this question by combining an audit experiment of 1260 local governments in Hungary with an intervention conducted in collaboration with a major Hungarian civil rights NGO. In the audit experiment we demonstrated that Roma individuals were about 13 pe...

2020 elején a magyarországi helyi önkormányzati hivatalok körében kontrollált terepkísérletet végeztünk annak céljából, hogy feltárjuk az online ügyintézés során esetlegesen előforduló hivatali diszkrimináció nyílt és burkolt formáit. Összesen 1270 e-mailben egy hétköznapi ügyintézéssel kapcsolatban fogalmaztunk meg egyszerű kérdéseket magas és ala...

Our research was aimed at exploring the different layers of trust with regard to Airbnb services, as well as the practices of discrimination on the platform. The fieldwork was carried out in the first half of 2020, partly before and partly after the COVID-19 related interventions, which significantly affected life in Budapest from mid-March 2020 on...

Our paper presents the results of a study which was conducted between 2016 and 2019 in a high school in Budapest. The research attempted to measure the impact of the Haver Foundation’s activities on high-school students. The Foundation implements activities about Jewish identity, thus we intended to see whether the different activities of the Found...

The specialty of our paper, based on the Hungarian survey of ISSP 2017 is that (1) we only focus on a single (the planning) phase of the migration process, (2) we use the concept of network capital, which fits the strategic features of the migration potential phenomenon, (3) we estimate the impact of the size of Ego’s network and that of the respon...

This chapter focuses on how public opinion has been formed in Hungary in recent years—partly as a consequence of the extremely xenophobic political discourse. The analysis is based on comprehensive empirical research carried out in 2015–2017—combining quantitative and qualitative research techniques. As a theoretical framework, I rely on the Interg...

Our research has been conducted between 2016 and 2019 in a high school of Budapest. In our innovative research, we examined the impacts of the activity-series of Haver Foundation regarding the attitude changes and the students’ knowledge about Jews. The methodological base of this research was controlled experiment which includes pre-testing and po...

This chapter makes use of the first effort to construct cross-country comparable reference budgets in Europe to show what the large cross-national differences in living standards imply in practice for the adequacy of incomes at the level of the at-risk-of-poverty threshold. The budgets show that, in the poorest EU Member States, even adequate food...

This paper describes small-scale experimental research (total N=160) implemented in Hungary in summer 2017 by TÁRKI, the Hungarian Social Research Centre. The research was based on a controlled field experimental design and examined the chances of ethnically different testers being offered rides on the most well-known international ridesharing plat...

Collaborative consumption platforms are rapidly spreading worldwide, establishing an innovative type of services. We focus our attention on the relation between online trust and the discrimination of ridesharing service users. Our central argument is that the personalization of transactions through the built-in selection mechanisms results in vario...

This study aims to explore some methodological considerations in social research involving people with intellectual disabilities and autism as participants in the context of the evaluation of current institutional closure programmes in Hungary. In particular, it addresses issues related to the evaluation of social services and the application of qu...

A jelen tanulmány a TÁRKI Társadalomkutatási Intézet által végzett, a Fogyatékossággal élő emberek életminősége és ellátási költségei című empirikus kutatás alapján készült. A vizsgálat négy célcsoport, az értelmi fogyatékos, az autizmussal élő, a súlyosan, halmozottan fogyatékos és a pszichoszociális fogyatékossággal élő felnőttek életminőségét és...

The aim of our paper is to offer a system of viewpoints for sociologists having to choose a method for their research. In the course of formulating their goals, researchers should give primary importance to reaching internal and external validity, as well as reliability. The practical realization of weighing between different methods is shown by a...

Findings from an international research programme on police stops in Bulgaria, Hungary and Spain are reviewed in the context of British and US debates on racism in police stops, and in particular the concepts of ethnic/racial profiling, disproportionality and institutional racism. The research uses surveys and qualitative interviews to examine the...