The Price of Prejudice
- Author(s)
- Morten Hedegaard, Jean-Robert Tyran
- Abstract
We present a new type of field experiment to investigate ethnic prejudice in the
workplace. Our design allows us to study how potential discriminators respond to
changes in the cost of discrimination. We find that ethnic discrimination is
common but remarkably responsive to the “price of prejudice”, i.e. to the
opportunity cost of choosing a less productive worker on ethnic grounds. In
addition, we find that the standard theory of statistical discrimination fails to
explain observed choices, and that taking ethnic prejudice into account helps to
predict the incidence of discrimination.- Organisation(s)
- Department of Economics, Vienna Center for Experimental Economics
- External organisation(s)
- University of Copenhagen
- No. of pages
- 54
- Publication date
- 04-2014
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 502002 Labour economics
- Keywords
- Portal url
- https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/the-price-of-prejudice(99727064-6e58-4b98-b206-cd906207c0e5).html