UC San Diego

This dissertation investigates inequality-related issues across three chapters, focusing on social media activism and disparate impacts of policies on historically marginalized groups. Chapter 1 provides the first causal evidence of slacktivism, the phenomenon whereby visible, low-effort forms of support on social media deter more vital, higher-cost actions. Using a laboratory experiment, I show that subjects who send –or “post”– a digital message to peers stating ‘I support racial justice’ are less likely to donate to related charities than those who could not publicize their support. While people believe their post is helpful, posts do not encourage others to give, and perceived effectiveness of posting is not driving results. Rather, self-interested biases explain behavior. Multiple mitigation strategies are unsuccessful, demonstrating the persistence of slacktivism. Chapter 2 shows that retaliation disproportionately disadvantages women on peer-to-peer review platforms. I leverage an exogenous policy change implemented by Airbnb in 2014 which made reviews simultaneous reveal, preventing users from seeing each other’s review before posting their own. The policy enhanced honesty by removing the ability to retaliate to negative reviews and reciprocate extremely positive ones. Analysis of review data reveals that while both male and female guests wrote less positively worded reviews, the negative shift was more pronounced towards male hosts. This indicates that reviews for male hosts were artificially elevated due to fear of retaliation, confirming that review systems with retaliatory capacity exhibit gender biases. Chapter 3 explores whether we can narrow application gaps and promote diversity by modifying language around qualification requirements in job ads. We established a non-profit company that acts as an intermediary in the job search process to conduct a large-scale, reverse audit study field experiment where we randomize the content of real job ads. We vary whether job seekers are encouraged to apply even if they don’t meet all the listed qualifications and whether they are informed that companies routinely hire individuals who do not have all qualifications. Preliminary results show this intervention encourages applications, and we hypothesize that it will have larger impacts on women and individuals from underrepresented racial groups by changing perceptions of the hiring process.