Recent events have made evident the fact that algorithms can be discriminatory, reinforce human prejudices, accelerate the spread of misinformation, and are generally not as objective as they are widely thought to be. In this talk, I will present a vignette from my recent work which tackles the problem of discrimination in housing and employment via online ad platforms. Recent studies show that the audience an ad gets shown to can be discriminatory with respect to socially salient attributes such as gender and race, crossing ethical and legal boundaries. To mitigate this, we propose a constrained optimization framework that allows the platform to control the audience that an online ad auction gives to an advertiser in a manner that avoids discriminatory allocation. Finding the parameters of this optimal auction, however, turns out to be a non-convex problem. We show how we can leverage the structure of the problem to develop a fast algorithm to solve it, resulting in a new auction mechanism that has the potential to alleviate bias in online advertising while simultaneously maintaining good empirical performance with respect to revenue. We will further discuss the hurdles in implementing such an approach, yet the importance of doing so.

Concerns about online manipulation have centered on fears about undermining the autonomy of consumers and citizens. Less analyzed are the risks that the same techniques of personalizing information online can also threaten equality. When predictive algorithms are used to allocate information about opportunities like employment, housing and credit, they can reproduce past patterns of discrimination and exclusion in these markets. In this talk, I will focus on the labor market and the increasingly dominant role of tech intermediaries in managing interactions between job-seekers and firms. Because these intermediaries rely on past behavioral data to distribute information about job openings and match job-seekers with hiring firms, their predictions about who will be a good match for which jobs will likely reflect existing occupational segregation and inequality. I will discuss the legal and policy implications of tech intermediaries' new role in labor markets, including the challenges in holding them responsible for discriminatory effects and the possibility of other regulatory responses that might address these concerns.

Since the turn of the millennium, the interdisciplinary field of information & communication technologies and development (ICTD) has explored how digital technologies could contribute to international socio-economic development. The associated research community includes both techno-utopians who imagine that just about any problem can be solved with the right application of technology, as well as extreme skeptics wary of any attempts at intervention. Debates continue, but in this talk, I will attempt to summarize some of the expressed consensus in ICTD -- things that not everyone necessarily believes, but will at least pay lip service to. I will also discuss what I call technology's "Law of Amplification," which reconciles some of the differing opinions in ICTD and also offers guidance for how mechanism design can have real-world impact.

Police officers in the United States currently kill about eleven hundred civilians annually. In contrast, police in Germany kill fewer than ten a year, and those in England and Wales kill about two. This talk will examine recent data on police homicides in the US, with particular attention to the geographic distribution of incidents and racial disparities in victimization. I consider and evaluate two competing hypotheses that seek to account for the data, and discuss the possibility that Simpson's paradox may be relevant for understanding the patterns that we see. Some historical context is provided with reference to the 1968 Kerner Commission Report and the Carnegie-Myrdal study of the 1930s. The talk will draw on material from Shadows of Doubt: Stereotypes, Crime and the Pursuit of Justice, written jointly with Brendan O'Flaherty (Harvard University Press, forthcoming in April 2019) as well as ongoing work with Jose Luis Monteil Olea and Brendan O'Flaherty.