All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. -Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Carefully designed scientific experiments have been an engine of economic, technological, and social progress for well over a century, which is why the public generally trusts such methods. Unfortunately, governments around the world still routinely oppose controlled trials of public policies.
Blinding identities during evaluations is often proposed as a way to combat discrimination and alleviate disparities, but previous studies have found mixed results. I implement blind review at an academic conference, and directly compare the scores that the same submitted paper received from blind and non-blind reviewers. With this design, I find that the effects of blinding differed by how a subject would perform the status quo without blinding. Blinding did not significantly impact the gender score gap among those that would perform the best or the worst under the status quo, but significantly exacerbated the gap among applicants who would have scored near the median without blinding. Consequently, the effect of blinding on acceptance rate gaps varied with the overall acceptance rate. This can help reconcile why blinding has worked in some contexts while not in others. Ultimately, it is necessary to examine distributional effects to understand exactly in which situations blinding produces desired outcomes. Even when the average treatment effect on gaps is small, this may mask important heterogeneity for individuals at different margins.
We review past research and discuss future directions on how the vibrant re-search areas of market design and behavioral economics have influenced and will continue to impact the science and practice of management in both the private and public sectors. Using examples from various auction markets, reputation and feedback systems in online markets, matching markets in education, and labor markets, we demonstrate that com-bining market design theory, behavioral insights, and experimental methods can lead to fruitful implementation of superior market designs in practice.
