A new Harvard study found racial discrimination by Airbnb hosts -- a poignant reminder that new technology doesn't automatically eliminate old problems.

As Bloomberg Business reported , researchers at the Harvard Business School found that people with names that sounded African-American had a harder time booking a place to stay on Airbnb than people with names like this correspondent's. The authors conducted a field experiment that examined 6,400 listings on Airbnb in five cities, concluding that "requests from guests with distinctively African-American names are roughly 16% less likely to be accepted than identical guests with distinctively White names."

That difference was the same regardless of whether the host was African-American, white or female, whether the property was expensive or cheap, or whether the host shared the property. The bias came at a price for hosts as well. According to the researchers, hosts who rejected guests they believed were African-American found a replacement guest just 35 percent of the time.

One approach that corporations and nonprofits like the Sunlight Foundation have used in recent years to increase the diversity of their hiring pools is to use "blind auditions ."

In blind hiring, applicants separate information that identifies them -- like their name -- from their qualifications, expressed in a resume, cover letter, and portfolio of design or software projects.

The technique, applied to on-demand companies like Airbnb and Uber , might express itself as showing a potential host or driver someone's rating and reviews, but not a name.

If you're an Airbnb host, you can already see what this could look like in practice. The researchers from the Harvard study released a plug-in for Google's Chrome browser on Dec. 9 to accompany their research called "Debias Yourself ."