Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Moral Foundations of the Big Data Economy

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

Increasingly the United States is a big data economy, a society in which corporations gather and analyze massive amounts of personal information to predict how individuals will behave so that they can more profitably price goods and services and allocate economic resources like insurance, credit, and jobs. This project addresses the question: What ideas about fairness underpin an economic system that uses data about individuals and their past behavior to determine who gets what going forward? Economic sociologists have long studied how markets and the people who decide their contours, like business leaders and regulators, institutionalize certain understandings of good and bad, of legitimate and inappropriate. Over time, these ideas about how markets should operate become taken-for-granted assumptions that seem natural and obvious, but when market practices are new, these ideas are not yet settled on. By studying the big data economy in its early years, this project seeks to capture how certain ideas about market fairness are becoming accepted?and others are being left aside. To understand these dynamics, the project focuses on the case of car insurance pricing and leverages a series of U.S. policy debates to study how market actors?including companies, regulators, and consumers?morally frame the use of personal data in insurance pricing. The project also studies how different moral frames enable or deflect the use of various types of information, such as credit scores, social media posts, and real-time driving data. The project draws from policy and industry documents, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic observations at insurance conferences to analyze how different ways of construing fairness lead to different business practices and policy outcomes. To complement these data, the project includes a survey of American consumers to understand the moral intuitions of the people whose lives are affected by these policies and practices. With this analysis, the project contributes to economic sociology?s morals and markets literature and burgeoning efforts to understand the practices of mass data collection, predictive analytics, and algorithmic decision-making, which increasingly give markets their shape. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.