Periodic Reporting for period 1 - EcoDisc (Investigating the moral ideals and social norms of economic discrimination)
Reporting period: 2022-11-01 to 2024-10-31
What do discrimination preferences look like, and what drives individuals to discriminate or refuse to discriminate? This project examines a richer set of discrimination preferences than what exists in the economics literature to improve our understanding of discrimination. The project examines the classical discrimination preferences in the literature of (i) a desire to favor (or harm) a group (often called a taste), and (ii) a desire to maximize one's expected financial earnings through statistical discrimination based on beliefs about group characteristics. It also adapts ideas from an extensive parallel literature showing that moral principles impact economic decisions involving implementing equality and retributing productivity—both standard features of discrimination decisions. That is, in addition to classical preferences, this project studies new preferences against discrimination, which it introduces from a moral principle that protected groups should be treated equally, and a new preference for statistical discrimination, which it takes from a principle that a more productive-on-average group should be retributed. The project first develops a portable methodology to evaluate preferences for and against discrimination (and underlying moral principles) using incentivized experiments. Then, it deploys this methodology to evaluate such preferences among a representative sample of a country along three dimensions central to anti-discrimination laws—ethnicity, gender, and LGBTQ+ status. The project will inform academics and policymakers regarding the extent and drivers of discrimination, and it will serve as the basis for further studies of discrimination.
First, the project developed a novel theoretical framework incorporating classical and new moral-based discrimination preferences. Second, it developed and tested new state-of-the-art incentivized experiments to measure discrimination preferences that can be deployed in a short time frame on large scales. Third, it deployed these new incentivized experiments among online representative samples of the UK population (around 3,000 participants). It does so for gender discrimination, ethnic discrimination, and LGBTQ+ status discrimination. Preliminary results show that new preferences are widespread, and their existence changes our understanding of why individuals discriminate. Fourth, the project is finalizing a working paper that provides the novel methodology and the results for the UK. This working paper will be made public around February 2025 and submitted to a top peer-reviewed journal in economics.
The project provides a new state-of-the-art scalable methodology to estimate various preferences about discrimination on large scales for different domains, e.g. for discrimination based on gender, ethnicity, and LGBTQ+ status. Public and private institutions can use this methodology to estimate discrimination preferences. In terms of impact, this will allow a better understanding of discrimination, e.g. understand the extent of discrimination, which type is more prevalent, and who discriminates, and serve as a basis for evidence-based policy to alleviate discrimination. In terms of methodology, preliminary results indicate that the methodology has good technical properties, such as consistency of answers in line with what is expected from the theoretical framework. Regarding the UK estimation, preliminary results indicate that taste-based preferences exist among a minority and that most individuals engage in statistical discrimination. Most have a moral-based preference against taste discrimination, and, unlike in classical models, most of the statistical discrimination in the experiments is explained by a moral-based preference to reward the most-productive-on-average group. We also produce various other results, such as regarding who tends to discriminate and how discrimination preferences map into policy and political support.