Dear RSF:

Please join us on Wednesday, February 7th at 11 in the library and on Zoom for a presentation by Visiting Scholar Barbara Kiviat entitled “The Moral Economy of Predictive Practices: A Tale of Credit Scores, Car Insurance, and Struggling to Find a Fair Market.” Her attached article, click here, circulated previously, provides essential background for the talk. She is assuming that everyone will have read the article prior to her presentation, as her book and the talk builds on it.

Kiviat is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stanford University and a faculty affiliate at the Stanford Center of Poverty & Inequality. She holds a PhD and an AM in Sociology from Harvard, an MPA in Public Policy from New York University, an MA in Journalism from Columbia University and a BA in Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University. Her doctoral dissertation won an award for Research Improvement from the National Science Foundation in 2018.

Kiviat is an economic sociologist who studies how moral beliefs and other cultural understandings shape markets and justify the inequalities they produce. She is particularly interested in how normative ideas influence the pricing and allocation of socially important resources, such as insurance, credit, and jobs.

At RSF, Kiviat is analyzing the 30-year battle over whether car insurers should be able to raise prices on drivers with low credit scores. She is drawing on documents from public policy debates, interviews with insurance company executives and insurance regulators, and participant observation to explore the moral justifications for using algorithmic predictions of behavior to offer individuals different products and prices.