Experimental Design
Intake. Memphis Inter-Faith Alliance (MIFA) is a nonprofit that provides rental and utility assistance to distressed tenants in Memphis, TN. They have agreed to link our survey on the ending screen of their online application for assistance. Tenants applying for MIFA aid will be offered the chance to participate in our survey: they will be told the survey will take approximately 15 minutes to complete and they will be compensated with a $15 gift card.
Design. Participants will first be asked a variety of background questions. The background questions will collect information about their housing situation, ask whether they have recently received an eviction notice, and elicit prior beliefs about the effect of an attorney in reducing eviction rates. Participants will then be randomly assigned one of three videos: a control video encouraging them to take the survey seriously and reminding them there are real stakes; an information-only treatment only; and a trust treatment. See above for details on the videos.
WTA. We now describe several details about the willingness to accept (WTA) elicitation. These are conducted as multiple price lists, incentivized using a Becker-Degroot-Marshak mechanism. Each tenant has two WTAs elicited: for an attorney who can represent them in the following year and for a reference good (an iPad). Tenants are randomized into reporting WTPs when we give them only $50 if they are selected (and then trade off more money versus the good), versus when we give them $500 if they are selected. The purpose of this elicitation is to test if materially relaxing budget constraints affects WTA. As a secondary outcome, we test the effect of relaxing the budget constraint on the reported WTA.
Purpose of treatments and intended tests. Our objective is to determine what drives demand for lawyers. The purpose of the information-only treatment is to shock beliefs about the efficacy of lawyers. The purpose of the trust treatment is to shock beliefs about the efficacy of lawyers and trust in the legal system. The difference between the information-only treatment and the control measures the effect of information. The difference in treatment effects between the trust and information-only treatment measures the effect of “trust.” Our focus is first on the WTA outcome, which we interpret as demand for lawyers. These are Intent-To-Treat estimates. We may also add demographic controls, using a principled control-selection procedure (e.g., Belloni et al., 2014).
In addition to establishing the ITT effects on demand across treatments, we directly capture the role of information and trust via treatment effects on belief updates and trust games, respectively. Finally, we further capture the role of information by eliciting prior and posterior beliefs, and measuring the effect of the information treatment relative to priors. For instance, we can study effects of information on demand among people with above-/below-median belief biases (or the instrumental-variables version of this specification). Thus, the experiment embeds multiple ways of testing for whether information and/or trust drive demand: via (1) the differential effects by treatment condition, and (2) the effects on outcomes intended to measure each channel directly.
We will primarily study the intent-to-treat of the two treatments versus control and each other. Additionally, for power, we may pool both treatments and compare them to control. Secondary tests will use the information-only treatments as instruments for beliefs.
Survey changes. We anticipate that the lawyers RCT will conclude on December 31. Therefore, on October 1, we will change the belief elicitation questions to be about the last three months of the program altogether (rather than the next three months going forward). In the fall, we will also need to take down the referrals outcome, as the program will no longer accept applicants.
References
Alsan, Marcella, Owen Garrick, and Grant Graziani. "Does diversity matter for health? Experimental evidence from Oakland." American Economic Review 109, no. 12 (2019): 4071-4111.
Belloni, Alexandre, Victor Chernozhukov, and Christian Hansen. "Inference on treatment effects after selection among high-dimensional controls." Review of Economic Studies 81, no. 2 (2014): 608-650.
Berg, Joyce, John Dickhaut, and Kevin McCabe. "Trust, reciprocity, and social history." Games and economic behavior 10, no. 1 (1995): 122-142.
Dizon-Ross, Rebecca, and Seema Jayachandran. "Improving Willingness-to-Pay Elicitation by Including a Benchmark Good." In AEA Papers and Proceedings, vol. 112, pp. 551-555. 2022.