【Job Talk】Discrimination as Retaliation

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• 研討會日期 : 2026-01-15
• 時間 : 10:30
• 主講人 : Mr. Till Wicker
• 地點 : Conference Room B110
• 主持人 : Professor Tzu-Ting Yang
• 演講者 : Mr. Wicker is expected to receive his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Tilburg in 2026. His research fields are Development Economics, Behavioral Economics, and Labor Economics. He is applying for a position of the Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica now.
• 演講摘要 : Discrimination remains pervasive, yet little is known about how past personal experiences of discrimination shape one's future discriminatory behavior. This paper introduces and empirically documents retaliatory discrimination: a form of discrimination whereby individuals are more likely to discriminate against a group after perceiving that they were personally discriminated against by members of that group. Guided by a conceptual framework that situates retaliatory discrimination alongside taste-based and statistical discrimination, I conduct experiments in Uganda and the United States. In a two-stage experiment, participants are first randomly exposed to fair or unfair task allocations from managers of varying identities: coethnic, non-coethnic, or neither (computer-assigned). In the second stage, I observe whether they discriminate against non-coethnic workers when placed in a managerial role. Experiencing unfair task allocations from a non-coethnic manager increases subsequent discrimination against non-coethnic workers by 78%, reducing their earnings by 15%. This effect is driven both by an increase in the number of discriminators and the intensity of discrimination. I distinguish between four pre-registered micro-foundations of retaliatory discrimination and find empirical support for motivated beliefs: participants selectively interpret unfair task allocations as discriminatory to justify retaliation. The experiments also illustrate how past experiences affect expectations of future discrimination, offering a behavioral foundation for anticipated discrimination. Finally, I show that retaliatory discrimination has meaningful policy implications: in a complementary experiment, the removal of affirmative action policies triggers a backlash that amplifies discrimination, in contrast to predictions of standard economic models of discrimination.