This project has received funding via the EUI Widening Programme call 2025. The EUI Widening Europe Programme initiative, backed by contributions from the European Union and EUI Contracting States, is designed to strengthen internationalisation, competitiveness, and quality in research in Widening countries, and thus foster a more cohesive European Higher Education and Research area.
The DYNDISC research project consists of three interconnected working packages, each focusing on discriminatory behaviour and its underlying patterns.
The first working package studies the potential interconnectedness between the two canonical theories of discrimination, which are generally assumed to work independently of each other. While taste-based discrimination proposes that discriminatory outcomes result from a decision-maker's (e.g., an employer) preference to interact with individuals from one group rather than another, statistical-based discrimination suggests that decision-makers facing imperfect information about an individual (e.g., productivity of a job applicant) rely on the distribution of characteristics within a group (e.g., group’s average productivity) to make a decision, leading to a potential favouring of subjects from a group with the superior distribution. Importantly, in the latter case, a decision-maker bases their assessment on their beliefs about distributions within different groups, which may or may not be correct. This package investigates whether decision-makers' “taste” for a given group affects their beliefs about the distribution of situation-relevant characteristics within that group.
The second work package investigates the effects of quotas, a policy frequently employed as means of countering discrimination in hiring decisions, among others. Most observed quota policies are unidimensional – i.e., defined to ensure a minimum representation of individuals with a specific trait in the set of hired candidates. Considering that, in many situations, there are multiple social categories exposed to discrimination, this project asks whether a unidimensional quota protecting one characteristic has an effect on the success probability of individuals with another non-protected characteristic. A hiring experiment where participants hire a team from a pool of candidates who are either male or female and either from the native majority or from a racial (or immigrant) minority will be applied.
The third work package studies norms regulating socially acceptable female behaviour and the effects of a between-group cultural transmission for their development. It studies the inflow of ethnic Greek refugees arriving from Turkey following the Greco-Turkish conflict in the early 20th century and its influence on the gender norms in the affected localities. This package will analyse how competition in the mating market impacts horizontal transfers between groups with differing gender norms. It is, nevertheless, conjectured that under competition, an individual from the local population has an incentive to double down on their more conservative preferences as a means of harming the newcomer competitors, even if otherwise inclined to adopt the new cultural trait (more liberal gender norms),.
For more information about the EUI Widening Europe Programme, please visit the official webpage.