Dr. Yuen Ho

• Yuen Ho, Selection and Sorting when Supervisors have Discretion: Experimental Evidence from a Tanzanian Factory, 2024Working Paper, 2024, URL , TARA - Full Text
• Yuen Ho and Yihong Huang, Breaking the Spiral of Silence, 2026Working Paper, 2026, URL
• Yuen Ho; Ye Rang Park; Jiaying Zhao; Supreet Kaur; Mahesh Srinivasan; Kristina Hallez, The Psychology of Poverty: Current and Future Directions, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 34, (1), 2025, p21 - 28Journal Article, 2025, URL , TARA - Full Text

• Yuen Ho, 2022Working Paper

• Title

  Scarcity and Discrimination
  Summary

  Human beings have implicit biases, across gender, race, and caste, which influence how they interact with others and the decisions they make. The impacts of bias across many domains are well documented, from education, to hiring, job performance, and access to credit or healthcare. Economics as a field has traditionally characterized discrimination as being based on preferences (taste-based or paternalistic) or beliefs (statistical-based). However, we propose that implicit bias would more accurately be modelled in terms of System 1 versus System 2 thinking, or automatic and intuitive versus more deliberate and logical decision making. In this framework, implicit biases are automatic and intuitive, it takes less mental effort to be biased. Likewise, a decision maker needs to expend more cognitive effort in order to overcome their implicit bias and make less discriminatory decisions. It directly follows that when a decision maker"s cognitive bandwidth is depleted, such as from fatigue or scarcity, that they should exhibit more biased behavior. Framing discrimination in this way thus leads to novel predictions not found in traditional economic models. We propose to test this hypothesis using a field experiment in Uganda, where we experimentally vary a decision maker"s cognitive stress, and examine the subsequent effects on bias in their decisions.
  Funding Agency

  Arts and Social Sciences Benefactions Fund
  Date From

  January 2026
  Date To

  December 2028

Applied economics, Labour economics, Applied economics not elsewhere classified, Experimental economics, Social sciences, Economics and Business Administration, Behavioural economics,

• UC Berkeley Fellowship for Graduate Study ($126,288) March 2019
• UC Berkeley Xlab Research Grant ($11,400) April 2025
• Weiss Fund for Research in Development Economics ($49,307) January 2023
• CEGA Spring 2025 Development Economics Challenge ($12,150) April 2025
• Arts and Social Sciences Benefaction Fund November 2025
• CEGA Fall Development Economics Challenge ($11,000) December 2022
• UC Berkeley Institute for Research on Labor and Employment ($5,920) August 2024
• CEGA Spring 2024 Development Economics Challenge ($18,660) April 2024
• UC Berkeley Xlab Research Grant ($5,000) January 2022
• J-PAL Gender and Economic Agency Initiative ($198,159) May 2021

• The Weiss Fund for Research in Development Economics
• Trinity Research in Social Sciences (TRiSS)