The limits of legal action: Markets, culture, and the persistence of racial bias in the business of American film and sports

This dissertation examines the fundamentals of racial bias from competing disciplinary perspectives, by asking three questions: why does racial bias exist, how is it manifested in modern markets, and how can it be minimized or eliminated? In doing so, I present a comprehensive new way to approach the study of bias---focusing on the connection between individual level bias, the evidence of racially biased outcomes in various corporate markets, and the legal mechanisms necessary to eliminate structural bias in modern U.S. commerce. To engage these theories of bias in the marketplace for American cultural goods, I focus on the concept of "customer discrimination", using original datasets for film distribution and professional sports to empirically question the role of race in consumer cultural market outcomes. Utilizing OLS and logistic regression techniques, along with other categorical methods, I examine these original data sets to test for racially biased market outcomes or consumer preferences. Finally, through the lens of existing civil rights laws, I explore modern anti-discrimination regimes and their application to the racial inefficiencies in the markets studied here. I find that both statistical and historical evidence demonstrate that corporations overestimate the degree of racial (specifically anti-black) bias on the part of white consumers. The resulting statistical discrimination thwarts the will of the market.;Based upon these empirical findings, I examine whether the government and the courts or market mechanisms are best able to reduce bias in American cultural industries. Ultimately, though the evidence suggests that both individual and corporate bias continue to structure economic outcomes, market mechanisms or non-binding government incentives provide a more efficient solution than legal challenges under existing legal regimes. Therefore, to make substantial progress in further reducing bias, individuals and corporations must focus on developing new ways of understanding how bias is manifested in markets and individual choice sets, while still recognizing that a legacy of discrimination in the United States continues to play a role in structuring industry and individual assumptions as well as market outcomes.