Research Grants

Our research focuses on the ethical implications and work-related consequences of algorithmic management in the case of Bubble Dan – a ride-hailing initiative. In the last decade, many firms have begun to employ multitudes of remote workers through the supervision and day-to-day control of algorithms that replace traditional middle-management roles.

In our case, the Bubble Dan transport at Tel Aviv incorporates machine-learning algorithms through a specialized app that is responsible for assigning riders to drivers and determines the vehicles' routes, including their stop sequence and the drivers' lunch breaks. However, as opposed to similar implementations by ride-hailing firms such as Uber and Lyft, in Bubble Dan's case, the workers are not “independent contractors” but instead officially employed by the company. As such, drivers experience interactions with both their direct human employer and the algorithmic management set in place to manage their day-to-day activities.

Our proposal focuses on understanding the ethical implications of such work conditions. In the proposed research, we seek to answer how drivers perceive the fairness and the work conditions created under the ride-hailing app and its algorithms. Moreover, we plan to focus on the roles of the human employer and its interactions with the drivers in addressing emerging ethical concerns. Last, we wish to test if perceptions of algorithmic unfairness affect employees' retention in the firm. The work will incorporate semi-structured in-depth interview, long-term field observations as well as online discourse analysis of correspondences between Bubble drivers. The research project aims to contribute in the field of AI in the workforce to both academics, managers and policy.

We develop a data-driven way to design the optimal policy experiment for increasing chances of escaping poverty. We collected data from in-person surveys of almost 1,000 individuals who were reared in poverty in Memphis, Tulsa, and New Orleans, and asked about their childhood health, parental income, home environment as a child, childhood experiences, lifetime traumas, neighborhood safety, a host of psychological skills, beliefs, and current income. Using typical descriptive approaches to motivate an intervention implicitly assumes one can alter individual characteristics in any way the data deem predictive – e.g. sending youth to college who have been the victims of abuse – even if one rarely observes that combination of characteristics in the data. We replace this with four axioms about the expected cost of altering any combination of individual characteristics. Under these axioms, the optimal experiment replicates the way people escape poverty in real life. We develop a method to identify the variable that should be most affected in an intervention and test it in various simulations. We find that educational attainment is the most important determinant of mobility. Yet, many other variables – traditionally ignored by economists – are almost equally important predictors: resilience, Big 5 personality skills, grit, self-esteem, the number of adults trusted, trouble with the police when young, and other adverse childhood experiences. Fathers present in own neighborhood did not matter. This suggests that income-increasing interventions for the poor need to be broader than simply human capital or place-based policies. 

How do individuals conceptualize the moral worth of their involvement in highly-controversial markets? Which justification regimes do they use to discuss their involvement in questionable industries?

The investigation of pragmatic morality focuses on exploring the justification regimes individuals operate and how they define and discuss their moral worth (Dromi & Illouz, 2010). In the current age of neoliberalism, capitalism, and mass consumption, the sex industry serves as one of the most prominent examples for morally questionable economic sites, in which individuals trade their bodily and emotional attributes in multiple and continuously changing contexts. By focusing on sex industry's consumers and analyzing their accounts of moral worth in different and intersecting geographic locations and discursive settings, especially in times of changing legal status, this study will contribute to the theoretical conceptualization of pragmatic morality and justification regimes within highly morally-controversial markets.

In this research we seek to explore the interaction of various “types” of states, the ability of (certain) individuals to choose among them and their ability to pick and choose public goods and services. We examine whether (and how) such capacity for choice affects people’s understanding of social justice, their levels of solidarity to their peers, and its possible effects on their productivity and risk taking. We further seek to inquire into how the dynamics of such markets may affect the nature and governance of different policy choices under global competition among states. We take an empirical approach to investigate the effects of various policy contexts.