Discrimination, competition and trust
On Friday 16 October Ethan Connor O’Leary will hold a trial lecture on a prescribed topic and defend his thesis for the PhD degree at NHH.
Title of the thesis:
«Essays on the Behavioural Economics of Discrimination».
Summary:
Why are some groups treated worse than others in job markets, competitions, or everyday interactions? And why does this behaviour persist even when groups are equally competent?
Ethan O'Leary's thesis looks for answers to these questions across three different settings, combining economic theory with experiments to understand how discrimination emerges and subsists.
The first chapter provides theoretical and experimental evidence for a novel mechanism through which discrimination may persist: the misinterpretation of the underlying behavioural source of unequal treatment. Anticipation of discrimination may lead otherwise equivalent groups to take different actions, and therefore they appear different in the face of evaluation. Misinterpreting unequal treatment as a product of a fixed bias makes this outcome more likely. The arising discrimination trap reduces the scope for learning of one’s misinterpretation and leads to inadequate demand for anti-discrimination policy implementation. These findings have important implications for how such policies are communicated to voters.
The second chapter studies how women's fear of discrimination shapes their willingness to compete. Using a large-scale online experiment, O'Leary shows that when their gender is visible to an evaluator, women anticipate discrimination and become less willing to enter competitive hiring processes. Strikingly, this effect is strongest among the least able candidates — which disrupts a well-documented pattern found in tournaments without evaluators in which less able women are usually the most willing to compete.
The third chapter turns to trust between social groups, recruiting self-identified Northerners and Southerners in England, a country with a longstanding North-South economic divide. Employing a novel experimental methodology to identify trust, subjects expressed a sharp asymmetry in trust: Northerners trust Southerners much less than their own group, whereas Southerners trust both groups equally. These results have important ramifications for the ongoing political debate on economic growth policies for the marginalised Northern regions.
Prescribed topic for the trial lecture:
«The economics of social identity: Theory and evidence»
Trial lecture and Defense:
Karl Borc Aud. Trial lecture start 10:15. Defense start 12:15
Supervisors:
Professor Erik Ø. Sørensen (main supervisor), Department of Economics, NHH,
Professor Sebastian Schweighofer-Kodritsch, Berlin School of Economics
Members of the evaluation committee:
Postdoctoral fellow Morten Nyborg Støstad (chair of the committee), Department of Economics, NHH
Professor Hannah Schildberg-Hörisch, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
Professor Georg Weizsäcker, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin