Taste-based discrimination

An economic model in which decision makers accept a material cost to avoid interaction with a disliked group, producing unequal market outcomes unrelated to productivity.

Version

v1 · 2026-09-08 · History

Domain-specific #

7064

Origin domain

labor economics

Subdomain

labor economics

Core Idea

Becker-style discrimination coefficients enter employer, worker or customer utility as a nonpecuniary aversion; competition can constrain but need not eliminate discrimination under sorting, market power or persistent preferences. A prejudiced actor evaluates a transaction using the ordinary price or productivity plus a subjective group-dependent cost, changing hiring, wage, trade or segregation choices in equilibrium. The abstraction is therefore identified by a declared carrier, a transformation or constraint over that carrier, and an invariant that tells an analyst whether the named structure is genuinely present.

Scope of Application

Taste-based discrimination belongs to labor economics and is useful where the analyst can specify the typed labor economics carrier, defining objects and relations, parameters, conventions, evidence, boundary cases, and comparison targets, then evaluate the market and actors, protected or social group, productivity and information, discrimination coefficient, utility or profit function, decision margin, competitive structure, observed disparities and identification against statistical discrimination are explicit. The scope is broad within that domain but bounded by the need for the market and actors, protected or social group, productivity and information, discrimination coefficient, utility or profit function, decision margin, competitive structure, observed disparities and identification against statistical discrimination are explicit.

Clarity

The abstraction clarifies a crowded vocabulary by making the market and actors, protected or social group, productivity and information, discrimination coefficient, utility or profit function, decision margin, competitive structure, observed disparities and identification against statistical discrimination are explicit the center of the account. A claim should name the carrier, the governing operation or relation, the applicable assumptions, and the recognition test.

Manages Complexity

Without the abstraction, an analyst must reason directly over many local details: the carrier roles, admissibility assumptions, competing conventions, derived invariants, boundary cases, and proof or validation obligations specific to Taste-based discrimination. Taste-based discrimination compresses them into the roles in the structural signature. That compression permits comparison across instances without erasing the variables that determine validity. It also exposes which details may be varied safely and which are constitutive.

Abstract Reasoning

1. Identify the carrier. State what the elements, states, objects, or observations are: the typed labor economics carrier, defining objects and relations, parameters, conventions, evidence, boundary cases, and comparison targets. Reject examples whose alleged carrier belongs to a different problem. 2. Lock the constitutive rule. Express the market and actors, protected or social group, productivity and information, discrimination coefficient, utility or profit function, decision margin, competitive structure, observed disparities and identification against statistical discrimination are explicit independently of one notation or implementation.

Knowledge Transfer

Knowledge transfers strongly among subfields of labor economics because they reuse the typed labor economics carrier, defining objects and relations, parameters, conventions, evidence, boundary cases, and comparison targets, A prejudiced actor evaluates a transaction using the ordinary price or productivity plus a subjective group-dependent cost, changing hiring, wage, trade or segregation choices in equilibrium., and type the carrier, state every parameter and convention in the definition, test that the market and actors, protected or social group, productivity and information, discrimination coefficient, utility or profit function, decision margin, competitive structure, observed disparities and identification against statistical discrimination are explicit, compare the nearest accepted identity, and report counterexamples, uncertainty, and limiting cases.

Relationships to Other Abstractions

Current abstraction Taste-based discrimination Domain-specific

Parents (1) — more general patterns this builds on

• Taste-based discrimination is a kind of Preference Prime

  The proposed strict upward parent is prime:preference.

Hierarchy path (1) — routes to 1 parentless root

• Taste-based discrimination → Preference

Neighborhood in Abstraction Space

Taste-based discrimination sits in a crowded region of the domain-specific corpus (39^th percentile for distinctiveness): several abstractions share nearly its structure, so a description that fits it tends to fit its neighbors too.

Family — Welfare, Production & Economic Choice (45 abstractions)

Nearest neighbors

• Willingness to pay — 0.91
• Demerit good — 0.90
• Polytomous choice — 0.89
• Monotone preferences — 0.89
• Social inequality — 0.89

Computed from structural-signature embeddings · 2026-09-08