Haushofer Johannes, Riis-Vestergaard Michala Iben, Shapiro Jeremy
Princeton University, Peretsman-Scully Hall, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA.
National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, USA.
Soc Choice Welfare. 2019 Apr;52(4):709-739. doi: 10.1007/s00355-018-1168-7. Epub 2019 Jan 24.
Randomized controlled trials, which randomly allocate benefits to a treatment group and not a control group, ascribe differences in post-treatment welfare to the benefits being allocated. However, it is possible that potential recipients' welfare is not only affected by the receipt of the program, but also by the allocation mechanism (procedural utility). In this paper, we ask whether potential recipients support or oppose random allocation of financial benefits, by allowing them to reward or punish an allocator conditional on her choice of allocation mechanism: direct allocation to one recipient vs. randomization among potential recipients. We find that when potential recipients have equal endowments, they on average reward the allocator for randomizing. When instead there is inequality in the potential recipients' endowments, the relatively poorer recipients punish allocators who randomize, while the relatively richer potential recipients neither reward nor punish the allocator for randomizing. Our results suggest that an allocator who chooses to randomize between potential recipients with unequal endowments imposes a social cost on the relatively poorer potential recipients.
随机对照试验将益处随机分配给治疗组而非对照组，并将治疗后福利的差异归因于所分配的益处。然而，潜在受益者的福利不仅可能受到项目接收情况的影响，还可能受到分配机制（程序效用）的影响。在本文中，我们通过允许潜在受益者根据分配机制的选择对分配者进行奖励或惩罚，来询问他们是否支持或反对经济利益的随机分配：直接分配给一名受益者与在潜在受益者之间进行随机分配。我们发现，当潜在受益者拥有相等禀赋时，他们平均会奖励进行随机分配的分配者。相反，当潜在受益者的禀赋存在不平等时，相对较穷的受益者会惩罚进行随机分配的分配者，而相对较富的潜在受益者既不奖励也不惩罚进行随机分配的分配者。我们的结果表明，在禀赋不平等的潜在受益者之间选择进行随机分配的分配者会给相对较穷的潜在受益者带来社会成本。
