Rajiv Sethi

During his fellowship, Rajiv Sethi plans to complete a book with the provisional title Messages and Meanings. This will build on his earlier work in Shadows of Doubt (Harvard University Press, 2019), but move beyond the domain of crime, policing, and the justice system. The book examines environments that are information rich but interpretation poor, which have become increasingly dominant in our daily lives. It explores how meanings come to be attached to the messages we send and receive. Messages here are broadly defined to include not just sequences of words, but also accents, tattoos, piercings, turbans, and other forms of self-expression, prices in markets, and personal attributes such as height, build, eye shape, and skin color. 

Sethi is a professor of economics at Barnard College, Columbia University and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His work deals with the economics of information, with applications to communication, prediction, crime, and policing. He has served on the editorial boards of several journals, including the American Economic Review, and is a co-author (with Brendan O’Flaherty) of Shadows of Doubt: Stereotypes, Crime, and the Pursuit of Justice, (Harvard University Press, 2019).