Tag Archives | Fairness in Markets

Which Data Fairly Differentiate? American Views on the Use of Personal Data in Two Market Settings

Barbara Kiviat

Sociological Science January 13, 2021
10.15195/v8.a2


Corporations increasingly use personal data to offer individuals different products and prices. I present first-of-its-kind evidence about how U.S. consumers assess the fairness of companies using personal information in this way. Drawing on a nationally representative survey that asks respondents to rate how fair or unfair it is for car insurers and lenders to use various sorts of information—from credit scores to web browser history to residential moves—I find that everyday Americans make strong moral distinctions among types of data, even when they are told data predict consumer behavior (insurance claims and loan defaults, respectively). Open-ended responses show that people adjudicate fairness by drawing on shared understandings of whether data are logically related to the predicted outcome and whether the categories companies use conflate morally distinct individuals. These findings demonstrate how dynamics long studied by economic sociologists manifest in legitimating a new and important mode of market allocation.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Barbara Kiviat: Department of Sociology, Stanford University
E-mail: bkiviat@stanford.edu

Acknowledgments: For helpful comments, the author thanks Laura Adler, Alexandra Feldberg, Carly Knight, Rourke O’Brien, Kim Pernell, Alix Winter, and the editors of Sociological Science, as well as participants of the MIT-NYU Morals and Markets Workshop and the 2019 annual meetings of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics and American Sociological Association. For advice on the survey instrument used in this research, the author thanks Birny Birnbaum, Douglas Heller, Rajat Jain, Sam Luks, Katherine Morris, Gennady Stolyarov II, and the Dobbin Research Group. The author gratefully acknowledges funding from the National Science Foundation (Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Award 1802286).

  • Citation: Kiviat, Barbara. 2021. “Which Data Fairly Differentiate? American Views on the Use of Personal Data in Two Market Settings.” Sociological Science 8: 26-47.
  • Received: September 26, 2020
  • Accepted: November 12, 2020
  • Editors: Gabriel Rossman, Ari Adut
  • DOI: 10.15195/v8.a2


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