Title: Should I Pay or Should I Go? A Prosocial Market Platform for Reducing Economic Inequality
Speaker:  Dovev Lavie, Bocconi University
Host: Pengfei Wang, Norwegian Business School
When: 15:00-16:30, May 27^th, 2026, China Time
Language: English
Where: Zoom
Register link: https://www.xcdsystem.com/iacmr/forms/index.cfm?ID=v9gx8PK

Abstract

Digital market platforms have traditionally adopted designs that concentrate market power and facilitate economic inequality by underscoring the pursuit of self-interest. But can an alternative platform design reduce economic inequality? We conceptualize a design for a prosocial market platform that enables consumers to overcome the tradeoff between personal consumption and charitable giving. The platform induces prosociality by redistributing value from higher-earning consumers that pay higher prices to subsidized lower-earning consumers, without impacting the vendor’s earnings. Whereas subsidized consumers gain economically, subsidizing consumers gain emotionally. A field experiment of the proposed price subsidization design reveals that in line with our predictions, the digital platform that leverages price subsidization reduces economic inequality, with higher earners creating sufficient value to subsidize lower earners under symmetric price distribution. We further observe increased satisfaction with this price subsidization design compared to the traditional market design. Our analysis shows how these results are achieved without reducing market activities, inflating consumption, exacerbating opportunistic behavior, or substituting alternative forms of donation, thus demonstrating the resilience of the price subsidization design. We complement our experiment with survey data and interviews that shed light on consumers’ motives. Extending research on relational prosocial behavior in communities, we show how design features of a digital platform can structurally routinize prosocial behavior among consumers in a community. By suggesting new ways for reducing economic inequality and improving consumer welfare we elucidate how this novel yet practical platform design approach can offer insights into societal challenges in various real-world market settings.

Speaker’s bio

Dovev Lavie is a Professor of Management at the Department of Management and Technology of Bocconi University. Formerly, he served as a Full Professor and Vice Dean of MBA Programs at the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion. He earned his Ph.D. in Management at the Wharton School and served as an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He also held visiting positions at the London Business School, Imperial College London, and BI Norway. Lavie is a Sloan Industry Studies Fellow, a recipient of the Strategic Management Society’s Emerging Scholar Award, and winner of the INFORMS TMS Best Dissertation Award and the Academy of Management Newman Award. His research interests include the evolution and performance implications of alliance portfolios, the balancing of exploration and exploitation, and applications of resource-based theory in interconnected technology-intensive industries. His work has been published in leading journals, such as the Strategic Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, and Strategy Science. Lavie has served as an Associate Editor at the Academy of Management Journal and the Strategic Management Journal and on the boards of other leading Journals. He also served as a Director-at-Large at the Board of the Strategic Management Society and held leadership positions at the SMS Cooperative Strategies Interest Group and the Academy of Management STR Division. His recent book – The Cooperative Economy: A Solution to Societal Grand Challenges (Routledge, 2023) identifies some design flaws in our economic system and proposes an alternative system based on prosocial behavior.