Attention Discrimination: Theory and Field Experiments with Monitoring Information Acquisition

By Vojtěch Bartoš, Michal Bauer, Julie Chytilová, Filip Matejka. Social Science Research Network, 2016

281 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We link two important ideas: attention is scarce and lack of information about an individual drives discrimination in selection decisions. Our model of allocation of costly attention implies that applicants from negatively stereotyped groups face "attention discrimination": less attention in highly selective cherry-picking markets, where more attention helps applicants, and more attention in lemon-dropping markets, where it harms them. To test the prediction, we integrate tools to monitor information acquisition into correspondence field experiments. In both countries we study we find that unfavorable signals, minority names, or unemployment, systematically reduce employers' efforts to inspect resumes. Also consistent with the model, in the rental housing market, which is much less selective than labor markets, we find landlords acquire more information about minority relative to majority applicants. We discuss implications of endogenous attention for magnitude and persistence of discrimination in selection decisions, returns to human capital and, potentially, for policy.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c810955a5c5caee47aac88546ed8507a9d9b8cbc

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Citations in the corpus

Discrimination Against Female Migrants Wearing Headscarves (2016, background): “Attention discrimination (Bartos et al. 2016) may be one”
Rationally Inattentive Behavior: Characterizing and Generalizing Shannon Entropy (2017, background): “…link between decision-making incentives and the structure of learning and illustrate sophisticated and realistic behaviors, such as incomplete consideration of options (Caplin, Dean, and Leahy 2019), attentional discrimination (Bartoŝ et al. 2016), and mental accounting (Kőszegi and Matĕjka 2020).”
Experimental Research on Labor Market Discrimination (2018, unknown): “Bartoš et al. (2016) Test for differences in “attention” in employer evaluation of job applicants by measuring parts of resumes examined by employers or efforts toward getting resume.”
Economics, Fairness and Algorithmic Bias (2020, unknown): “…per case.65 Psychology and behavioral economics research has highlighted that settings where there is limited attention are where humans are most likely to resort to shortcuts and heuristics, some of which (stereotypes) may have adverse consequences along fairness lines (Bartoš et al., 2016).”
Hiring Discrimination: An Overview of (Almost) All Correspondence Experiments Since 2005 (2017, unknown): “Asian or Roma (versus native) name Czech Republic Bartoš et al. (2014) - A.9.”
Ethnic and gender discrimination in the rental housing market: Evidence from a meta-analysis of correspondence tests, 2006–2017 (2018, background): “We included data from 25 studies, covering 14 countries: France (Acolin et al., 2016, Bunel et al., 2017, Bunel et al. 2016, Le Gallo et al., 2017), Canada (Hogan, Berry, 2011), Czech Republic (Bartoš et al., 2016), Slovakia (Sacherová, 2016), Finland (Öblom and Antfolk, 2017), Denmark (Herby and Ni”
Rational Inattention to Discrete Choices: A New Foundation for the Multinomial Logit Model (2015, unknown): “Rational inattention has mostly been applied in macroeconomic contexts such as consumption-savings problems (Sims 2006; Ma ́ ckowiak and Wiederholt 2010) and price setting (Ma ́ ckowiak and Wiederholt 2009; Mat ̌ ejka 2010a). A few papers, however, consider applications with binary choice problems. ”