Date & Time: Los Angeles (7 am), Cincinnati (10 am), Bath (2 pm), Munich (3 pm), Beijing (10 pm), Singapore (10 pm), Sydney (March 23, 1 am)

Anqi Li will present the paper titled "Rationally Inattentive Statistical Discrimination: Arrow Meets Phelps" (joint work with Federico Echenique).

This talk is part of the Global Seminar on Contests & Conflict, an online seminar series with researchers from across the world. You can sign up to the Global Network to get information and invitations (including the Zoom Link for each event) about the Global Seminar here: Max-Planck-Institut für Steuerrecht und Öffentliche Finanzen: Global Seminar on Contests & Conflict (mpg.de).

You can directly access the event here: 

Zoom

Abstract of the Paper:
When information acquisition is costly but flexible, a principal may rationally acquire information that favors a ``majority'' group over ``minorities'' unless the latter are strictly more productive than the former (the relative size of the groups plays no actual role). Majorities therefore face incentives to invest in being productive to the principal, whereas minorities are discouraged from such investments. The principal, in turn, focuses scarce attentional resources on majorities precisely because they are likely to invest. Our results have welfare and policy implications, as they add to the discussion of affirmative action, as well as the empirical literature on implicit bias and discrimination in performance evaluation.

Chair: Qiang Fu, Co-Chair: Tracy Liu and Lionel Page