Economics Seminar - Signals of Consent

The abstract is: Violations of sexual consent are painful for the victims and disturbing for society. While cases of assault and harassment present important variations, a common feature often emerges in courtrooms. A victim and an accused acknowledge that a sexual encounter took place, but they disagree on whether that was mutually consensual. Depending on the jurisdiction, two models are typically applied in rulings over such cases. One is the affirmative consent (“yes means yes”) model, the other is the negative consent (“no means no”) model. The two models overlap in that they both require a conscious expression of a signal; a yes or a no. However, they differ in how they treat the absence of a signal, i.e., in the role they assign to silence. While the affirmative model suggests that silence cannot be an indication of consent, the negative model proposes that silence is not an indication of withdrawn consent. To study the complexities of silence, we construct a theoretical and experimental paradigm where silence exists as a communication strategy between a consent giver and a consent taker. We extend the paradigm to consider environments where choices carry yes means yes or no means no implications similar to those produced by the affirmative and negative legal frameworks. The generated data allow us to perform welfare comparisons between the two frameworks considering consent violations, missed matches, and false accusations.