Research Grants

Economic theory suggests that public goods that depend on voluntary contributions will be undersupplied. This potential inefficiency is due to the free rider problem, in which an individual hopes to benefit from a public good without contributing, in the expectation that others will contribute. Nonetheless, people often contribute to public goods: they go on strike, pay taxes, limit their consumption of common resources and donate to charity. Thus, the assumption that individuals are purely rational and self-interested is inconsistent with people’s actual voluntary contributions to public goods.

Experimental economists have simulated this social dilemma in the lab, using monetary incentives, with the goal of better understanding the motives for contributing to a social good. Although a number of factors that affect this kind of decision making have been clearly identified, much remains to be learned in order to understand the circumstances in which individuals will contribute.

This project involves an experiment of a public good game which encourages pre-play text communication between the players. We will use machine learning techniques to analyze the pre-play communication and link it to contribution levels. Our main goal is to investigate whether levels of contribution can be predicted from the pre-play communication. Concurrently, our analysis is expected to shed light on the motives behind individuals’ contributions and the circumstances in which they refrain from contributing.

Racial and gender discrimination has been extensively documented in various markets and industries around the globe, including the housing and labor markets. In particular, studies have found that women, African-American, and other minority job applicants are significantly less likely to receive a call-back from a potential employer, and that minority tenants are discriminated against by residential landlords. Yet, to date, far too little is known about discrimination in consumer markets. The proposed research will contribute to the scholarship on markets, ethics and the law, by investigating an especially neglected form of marketplace discrimination: selective enforcement of both the law and sellers’ formal policies.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that sellers often exercise discretion, deviating from the formal terms of the deal to please consumers. Yet, evidence from other domains, such as policing, prosecution, and adjudication, suggests that decisionmakers often exercise discretionary powers discriminatorily across gender and racial lines. This evidence raises the concern that sellers’ discretionary authority to depart from the policy in favor of some consumers may be applied inconsistently to the disadvantage of minority consumers.

Drawing on insights from economics and social psychology, the proposed research will test whether, when, and to what extent sellers treat minority consumers differently in their implementation of the rules and policies governing their transactions. This research will rely on retail product returns as a test-case. It will consist of a series of field experiments, all aimed at testing discriminatory enforcement of return policies in the retail market. Using an audit technique, the proposed research will explore whether sellers exercise their authority inconsistently, based on race, nationality, gender, assertiveness in bargaining, or perceived socio-economic status. The experiments will identify the factors associated with a more lenient treatment of consumers than that required by the law or the formal return policy, while analyzing their interactions, and weighing their relative importance. Finally, the research will explore the policy implications of the findings. In particular, the study will consider whether and how consumers could legally challenge any observed disparate treatment, either under current consumer protection laws or under existing civil and human rights statutes.

The past few years have seen a significant rise in the use of algorithmic decision-making systems (ADS) to assist or replace human decision-making in a wide array of contexts. These include policing, criminal sentencing, and social welfare assistance. ADSs are also increasingly shaping market interactions, from bank decisions on loans to insurance premiums. Yet despite the social and ethical ramifications of using ADS in such divergent contexts, public and private sector actors are routinely procuring and deploying algorithmic systems without the knowledge and consent of those most affected by these decisions – the broad public. This can be a source of substantial political backlash, as attested by recent examples of governments and tech companies having to backtrack or cancel initiatives that use ADSs due to public outcry. The key question is where and how AI can be used for advancing social good in ways that gain public approval. This project will investigate public views on the fairness, effectiveness, and legitimacy of AI in a range of market interactions. The study will use a large field experiment in an online labor marketplace and a panel survey to examine how perceptions evolve in response to personal experience with AI-guided decision-making and, later, exposure to information about the technology and its potential ethical implications. By doing so, the project will generate novel insight into the way AI and ADSs can be used productively in the public domain..

Big Tech platforms such as Facebook and Google offer their services for free. Users are not required to pay Google to search the Internet or Facebook to share content on Instagram. These platforms and other providers of digital services make money by collecting information on their users and monetizing it. In this project, we explore the dynamics underlying the exchange of personal information for “free” services. Our premise is that providing a service for free does not simply reduce the price of the service for consumers, it fundamentally alters the nature of the interaction between Internet platforms and their users. Specifically, users that use free services may frame their use of Internet platforms as non-market interaction. This framing evokes different expectations regarding data collection and privacy. Thus, consumers may be more resentful of “free” services that monetize personal information that they collect. Our research will use experiments to test the effect of free services on users’ willingness to share their personal information.

This study will address the question of how a liberal democratic state should respond when crucial aspects of a community’s way of life are inconsistent with participation in a fair social contract.  Specifically, it seeks to determine what policy interventions may be ethically justified given the challenges posed by the ultra-Orthodox sector—which is characterized by high fertility, low male labor-force participation, and high poverty levels—to Israel’s public finance and economic development.  We begin with the observation that two of the core commitments of a liberal state, to pursue distributive justice and to respect diverse life choices, are increasingly in tension with one another with respect to the ultra-Orthodox population.  As a result, if current trends continue, the state is likely to face a serious dilemma:  Either it will have to reduce its generosity as a welfare state, thereby compromising on its commitment to distributive justice, or it will have to intervene more forcefully in the life choices of its citizens, for example by obligating them to work, limit their family size, or accept the demand to study secular subjects.  In order to help policy-makers navigate this difficulty, we seek to develop a theory of fair cooperation that is both sensitive to the claims of religious belief and communal identity and grounded in the realities of public finance.  Furthermore, by testing existing theories of justice and social welfare against the concrete example of the ultra-Orthodox in Israel, we hope to shed broader light on the demands of reciprocity in multicultural societies.

The individual’s emergence as a general creed – as a novel category of social thought ‎called “individualism” – signaled the creation of a distinctly liberal politics.  The event can even ‎be dated, traced to 1840, which is when Alexis de Tocqueville adopted the term in order to ‎explain the inter-subjective dynamics of democracy in America.  It was a pointed, if not ironic, ‎allusion to the private foundations of public life in the United States, which stripped the ‎commonweal of its once a priori status, of any anterior claim, that is to say, to the citizen’s ‎pursuit of his own happiness.  Society would consequently become a function of the “power of ‎me,” Ralph Waldo Emerson announced a few years later as well, rendering community into ‎something of an oxymoron, at least in the traditional terms of Anglo-Saxon protection covenants ‎which had formerly entrusted government to those “who possess the most attractive merit and ‎most diffusive and established characters.”  That is how James Madison evoked the civic ‎humanism of the new republic in 1787.  By the time Tocqueville embarked at Newport, Rhode ‎Island in the spring of 1831, however, such character and merit had been displaced by a far more ‎pedestrian set of habits which awarded the demos and its baser appetites unprecedented sway ‎over America’s great experiment in self-government.  A communal devotion to self-interest was ‎now the country’s prevailing civic ideal. ‎

‎“Individualism in the New World” will explore this pivotal – if implausible – inversion of ‎the traditional understanding of good government, which had long rested on the critical need to ‎restrain individual prerogative.  Tocqueville was the first to systematically engage this new style ‎of politics, doing so in the two volumes of his Democracy in America, which described an ‎ongoing negotiation between self and society that kept everyone’s relations with each other in a ‎continuous state of flux.  The ensuing restlessness became commonly identified with life in ‎America.  And while that identification was more than a little over-determined – Tocqueville ‎carelessly recycled New World conceits locating the sovereign self on the first ships – it ‎nevertheless inspired this important dissertation on liberal theory and its practice, the most ‎perspicacious study of the subject ever written, before or since.

The phenomenon of discriminating against people because of their religion, race, sexual   orientation and so on is as outrageous as it is prevalent, and legislatures all over the world did well to enact special laws prohibiting discrimination. When suppliers refuse to serve somebody without apparent justification, and when the customer belongs to a disadvantaged group, the working assumption is that the refusal is a case of wrongful discrimination. But what if providing the required service violates the supplier’s deeply held normative commitments? Can the supplier refuse to provide the service on something analogous to conscientious objection grounds? In this article we answer this question in the affirmative. When the refusal to serve clients does not stem from disrespect to them, but from the supplier's genuine desire not to engage in activities he or she deeply opposes, the refusal should not be considered (wrongful) discrimination. The thesis is not that we should balance between the prohibition on discrimination and freedom of conscience in such a way that sometimes licenses discrimination so as not to harm the supplier's conscience. Rather, the idea is that some cases that appear to be discrimination because the refused customers belong to a disadvantaged group are not really discrimination because the supplier is not motivated by hostility or by disrespect towards them.