演講者簡介 : Professor Sevgi Yuksel received her Ph.D. in Economics from New York University in 2015. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests are Microeconomic Theory, Political Economy and Experimental Economics.
演講摘要 : We provide evidence for a previously undocumented cognitive bias that we call “contrast-biased evaluation” which is particularly relevant to settings of statistical discrimination. Experimental subjects distort their perception of information on individual group members and misinterpret such information to be more representative of the group the individual belongs to in contrast to a reference group. As such, the bias disappears when subjects either (i) receive information before learning of the individual’s group or (ii) are prevented from contrasting different groups. We show that this bias can be easily estimated from appropriately constructed datasets and can be distinguished from previously documented inferential biases in the literature. Importantly, we document how removing the bias produces a kind of free lunch in reducing discrimination, making it possible to significantly reduce discrimination without lowering accuracy.
