Spiraling or self-correcting discrimination: A multi-armed bandit approach

Arbeitspapier

Can workers from social groups of comparable productivities obtain comparable employment opportunities in the long run? We model dynamic hiring and employer learning via a general Poisson multi-armed bandit framework. Breakdown environments that reveal on-the-job mistakes rather than successes give a large advantage to marginally more productive groups. Breakthrough environments, in contrast, guarantee comparable payoffs to comparable groups. This insight is robust to various sources of across-groups heterogeneity, belief misspecification by employers, and varying degrees of labor demand scarcity. Equal access to productivity investment only enhances prior differences across groups.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: CSIO Working Paper ; No. 0147

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness ; Labor Discrimination ; Stochastic and Dynamic Games; Evolutionary Games; Repeated Games
• Subject: breakdown learning ; breakthrough learning ; endogenous bandits ; spiraling property ; self-correcting property ; ranking multiplicity

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Bardhi, Arjada ; Guo, Yingni ; Strulovici, Bruno
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Northwestern University, Center for the Study of Industrial Organization (CSIO)
• (where): Evanston, IL
• (when): 2019

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/274040
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:45 AM CET