Attention Discrimination: Theory and Field Experiments with Monitoring Information Acquisition

Abstract

Understanding why people discriminate based on ethnicity, gender, or other observable group attributes has been one of the central topics in economics and other social sciences for decades.1 Since the seminal work of Phelps (1972) and Arrow (1973), it has been widely acknowledged that due to a lack of individual-level information decision makers often rely on a group attribute as a signal of unobserved 1 Researchers have produced a vast amount of evidence documenting discriminatory behavior based on ethnicity or gender on labor, housing, and consumer markets. Yinger (1998) and Altonji and Blank (1999) survey regression-based ( nonexperimental) evidence, and Riach and Rich (2002) and List and Rasul (2011) summarize related field experiments.

Food consumption and diet quality choices of Roma in Romania: a counterfactual analysis

“…Around 78% of Roma in Romania live in households with incomes below the poverty line, 1 while 22% of Romanians live below the poverty line (FRA 2014a). In most European countries including Romania, Roma populations face, to varying degrees, discrimination, which is reflected in racism and exclusion from the formal labour market as well as more difficult access to healthcare and education than the majority population (e.g., Tomovska 2010;European Commission 2012;FRA 2012FRA , 2014aFRA , 2014bBartoš et al 2016;Ciaian and Kancs 2016a).…”

An Introduction to Audit Studies in the Social Sciences

“…Since the early 2010s, the number of audit studies appearing in journals and working Two studies related to taste-based versus statistical discrimination stand out among the rest (Bartoš et al 2016;Pager 2016). In the first, the authors examined how both an individual characteristic, in this case race, and the type of market can lead to "attention discrimination," or the differential use of available information.…”

Electoral Competition with Rationally Inattentive Voters

“…Rationally inattentive agents choose how much and what pieces of information to pay attention to. Regarding empirical evidence of endogenous attention, Gabaix et al(2006), for instance, explore attention allocation in a laboratory setting, and Bartoš et al (2014) explore attention to applicants in rental and labor markets. Shleifer (2013, 2015) provide an alternative theoretical framework to study how salience affects choices made by consumers with limited attention.…”