Economics Insights @ CBS

Previous research on the antecedents of people’s judgments of procedural and interactional fairness has focused primarily on situational factors. Across three studies we find that dispositional tendencies, in particular people’s general propensity to trust others, also influence fairness perceptions. People who were more trusting had more positive perceptions of procedural and interactional fairness, even when they were exposed to identical fairness information.

Theories based on information costs or frictions have become increasingly popular in macroeconomics and macro-finance. The literature has used various types of information choices, such as rational inattention, inattentiveness, information markets or costly precision.1 Using a unified framework, we compare these different information choice technologies and explain why some generate increasing returns and others, particularly those where agents choose how much public information to observe, generate multiple equilibria.

Web 2.0 provides gathering places for internet users in blogs, forums, and chat rooms. These gathering places leave footprints in the form of colossal amounts of data regarding consumers' thoughts, beliefs, experiences, and even interactions. In this paper, we propose an approach for firms to explore online user-generated content and "listen" to what customers write about their and the competitors' products. Our objective is to convert the user-generated content to market structures and competitive landscape insights.

Despite the continuing, adverse impact of discrimination on the lives of racial and ethnic minorities, the denial of discrimination is commonplace. Four experiments investigated the efficacy of perspective taking as a strategy for combating discrimination denial. Participants who adopted a Black or Latino target's perspective in an initial context were subsequently more likely to explicitly acknowledge the persistence of intergroup discrimination than were non-perspective takers (Experiments 1–3) or participants who adopted a White target's perspective (Experiment 1).