Eric Dickson, NYU

Date: 

Friday, December 2, 2016, 12:00pm to 1:30pm

Location: 

CGIS S050

Profiling in the Lab: How Group Targeting by Law Enforcement Affects Legitimacy and Compliance
(with Sandy Gordon and Greg Huber)

One of the most contentious issues in criminal justice is the disproportionate targeting of minorities for stops and searches. Defenders of the practice argue that “profiling” may be efficient, whereas critics maintain that it undermines the legitimacy of the enforcement enterprise by violating fairness norms and imposing a disproportionate burden on innocent surveillance targets. We examine these issues in the context of two incentivized laboratory experiments, which are embedded in a public goods game setting with a centralized authority. First, we develop a new method of empirically estimating an authority's legitimacy using choice data.  Second, we separate the legitimating effect of an authority’s choice to forgo information about the group identity of potential enforcement targets from the potential efficiency gains that may stem from the authority’s access to superior information about group contribution levels. The experimental design permits us to better understand how the reduction in legitimacy associated with group profiling affects the subsequent behavior of subjects in the targeted and untargeted groups, who may vary both within and across groups in their underlying incentives to contribute.