Preferences for Rights

Last registered on September 15, 2023

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Preferences for Rights
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0012065
Initial registration date
September 11, 2023

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
September 15, 2023, 8:56 AM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

Region

Primary Investigator

Affiliation
MIT

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Affiliation
Stanford
PI Affiliation
MIT

Additional Trial Information

Status
In development
Start date
2023-09-11
End date
2024-12-31
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.
Abstract
Many political and philosophical debates over in-kind provision emphasize “rights,” a form of non-welfarist preferences — for instance, “Right to Counsel” for indigent legal defense and “Right to Health Care.” We conduct online experiments that test for and quantify the presence of non-welfarist preferences over allocating legal counsel and health care to tenants facing eviction.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Caspi, Aviv, Julia Gilman and Charlie Rafkin. 2023. "Preferences for Rights." AEA RCT Registry. September 15. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.12065-1.0
Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
We conduct four primary and two secondary elicitations, using spectator designs. Spectators are participants recruited using an online survey platform (Prolific or similar). Spectators are asked to allocate up to five separate goods to anonymous low-income people (“Recipients”). The primary interventions typically randomize the good itself, and we test for different behavior with the “treatment” goods (i.e., those over which we propose participants may have non-welfarist preferences) vs. “placebo” goods (i.e., those that have value to low-income people but for which spectators are unlikely to have non-welfarist preferences.)

The treatment goods are:
Good 1: Provision of health care.
Good 2: Provision of an attorney to a tenant facing eviction.

The placebo goods are:
Good 3: Bus passes
Good 4: YMCA memberships
Good 5: Cash (only in some experiments)

Primary elicitations
We list here, for each of the elicitations, what we randomize. See Experiment Details section for explanation of each elicitation.
Elicitation 1: Targeting. We randomize across Goods 1–5.
Elicitation 2: Inalienability. We randomize across Goods 1–4.
Elicitation 3: Optional value. We randomize across Goods 1–4. We randomize the value of cash between $200 and $300.
Elicitation 4: Universalism. We randomize across Goods 1–4. We randomize whether the number of people who have already received the good is 1, 5, or 9.

Secondary elicitations
Elicitation 1a: Valuation. We randomize across Goods 1–4.
Elicitation 1b: Information. We randomize across Goods 1–2. We randomize whether information provided is High or Low (see experiment details).
Intervention (Hidden)
Intervention Start Date
2023-09-11
Intervention End Date
2023-12-31

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
Elicitation 1: Targeting
Indicator for choosing to allocate the good to all 10 Recipients
Number of Recipients whom the Spectator chooses to receive the good (indifference point)

Elicitation 2: Inalienability
Indicator for choosing the maximum price to avoid switching the lottery
Willingness to pay to avoid switching the lottery (indifference point)

Elicitation 3: Option value
Indicator for having a positive willingness to pay to ensure a choice
Willingness to pay to ensure a choice (indifference point)
Primary heterogeneity: willingness to pay to ensure a choice, conditional on having a high posterior belief that the recipient would choose cash (see experiment details)

Elicitation 4: Universalism
Amount willing to forgo from outside option to provide the good (indifference point)
Primary Outcomes (explanation)
Elicitation 4:
Note that our primary analysis will employ a “difference in differences” specification (see experiment details). Thus, the indifference point specified as a primary outcome is conditional on the number of recipients who have been allocated the good.

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Correlations between Elicitation 1 outcomes and Elicitation 2, 3, and 4 outcomes (pairwise and joint)

Tagging people as non-welfarist. We will identify people as non-welfarist if they engage in non-welfarist behaviors in any, some, or all of Eliciations 2, 3, and 4. We will report these numbers.

Incentives. In Elicitation 1a, we employ a secondary treatment to test whether incentives affect behaviors. In 1a, we randomize whether we incentivize lawyers and placebos. The purpose of this randomization is to test the extent to which incentives matter (insofar as it could generate differences between lawyers and health care).

In a second test for the effect of incentives, we leverage the following source of variation. Because the presentation for the health care and lawyers varies slightly (including discussion of incentives), we randomize placebo goods into seeing the exact framing as lawyers versus health care, so some placebo goods are not incentivized throughout (see Experiment Details). This variation jointly tests the effects of presentation and incentives. Since we expect the presentation alone is small, it is also a test of the effects of incentives.

Elicitation 1a: Valuation
Willingness to pay for the good (indifference point)

Elicitation 1b: Information
Share of people who revise choice about how to allocate good
Magnitude of revision in choice about how to allocate good
Suggestive: instrumental-variables specification that instruments for the effect of beliefs on Elicitation 1-outcomes.

Secondary heterogeneity:
The relationship between political party and exhibiting non-welfarist preferences (behaviors in Elicitations 1–4)
The relationship between personal experience (with facing legal problems without a lawyer or not seeking health care due to cost) and exhibiting non-welfarist preferences (behaviors in Elicitations 1–4)
The relationship between support for Right to Counsel and health care and exhibiting non-welfarist preferences (behaviors in Elicitations 1–4)
The relationship between income and exhibiting non-welfarist preferences (behaviors in Elicitation 1–4). This heterogeneity is useful to explore because non-welfarist preferences may only be prevalent among the rich and/or those with high levels of education, in which case welfarist social welfare functions that aggregate up such preferences and place significant weight on “rights” would be regressive.
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)
Correlations. We seek to quantify how much of the targeting we see can be explained by behavior in the non-welfarist preferences elicitations.

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
Embargoed.
Experimental Design Details
Setup. We conduct several experiments with the same people. We inform participants (Spectators) that they will make choices about allocating various goods to Recipients. We inform them that these goods will be allocated by a nonprofit that works in Memphis.

Our main objective is to test for the existence of “non-welfarist” preferences for health care and/or lawyers. By non-welfarist preferences, we mean preferences in which Spectators value features of the goods that do not directly increase the utility of the Recipients. Most of our elicitations are designed with the goal of comparing the treatment goods (health care or lawyers) to placebo goods (bus passes or YMCA memberships), which are also useful for participants but over which we do not expect Spectators will have non-welfarist preferences.

Randomization. Participants (Spectators) are randomized to observe all elicitations for one good. The exception is that for Elicitation 1, half of the Spectators who are otherwise randomized to observe a placebo good are randomized to see the elicitation with cash as the good.

We sometimes use the notion of “willingness to pay” (WTP) as a shorthand. Participants never pay. In some cases, they are asked to trade off providing cash to an outside option (future programming for the nonprofit or a donation to a food bank) and providing a good, service, or cash to the Recipient. In other cases, they are asked to trade off providing cash to some tenants versus goods to the same or other tenants.

Elicitation 1. This elicitation asks Spectators to choose between allocating the good and money to low-income Recipients, versus allocating the good to more Recipients (who are relatively less low-income) and less money to the low-income Recipients. For instance, we ask Spectators to choose between giving lawyers to a group of 10 tenants or giving just the 5 poorest tenants a lawyer and some amount of cash. We ask these questions iteratively until we identify the number of Recipients at which they are indifferent.

We expect that participants will exhibit more “anti-targeting,” i.e. allocate the good to a larger number of Recipients (even though they are relatively less low-income), when the good is health care or lawyers, versus the placebos. We compare targeting behaviors across the goods.

Elicitation 2. This elicitation informs Spectators that a Recipient has been allocated a good in a lottery. The Spectator can choose to rerun the lottery and earn money for the nonprofit which can be used to allocate more goods in the future to other Recipients. The idea is that Spectators may think that health care or lawyers are “inalienable” rights, and therefore require a large amount of money to take these goods from Recipients once they have been allocated. Spectators are informed that Recipients will not know whether the lottery was rerun are not and are only informed of the final allocation. We test for the amounts of inalienability across goods. We elicit the WTP, which is operationalized as the indifference point for the amount of money the nonprofit would need to save by rerunning the lottery.

Elicitation 3. This elicitation proceeds in three parts. First, we ask Spectators to report incentivized prior beliefs about how likely it is that Recipients would choose the good when offered the choice between $X of cash and the good. Second, we truthfully inform Spectators that choosing the good is rare, based on pilot data we collected. We then ask Spectators to report posterior beliefs after receiving the information. Third, we ask Spectators to report their WTP to give Recipients the choice between $X of cash and the good, versus giving the Recipients $X of cash alone and saving the remaining money for future nonprofit programs.

The idea behind this elicitation is that Spectators with non-welfarist preferences may value giving Recipients the choice in itself, even if they are told that exercising the choice is unlikely. Our primary tests will compare the Spectators’ willingness to pay for choice when the good is health care/a lawyer vs. the placebo goods.

A concern about this elicitation is that Spectators value choice for welfarist reasons, e.g. that Recipients with high value for the good may benefit from the choice even if it is unlikely that they will exercise it. We address this concern in two ways. First, we randomize the $X of cash (between $200 and $300). If WTP for choice does not depend on $X, that implies that Recipients are not “selecting on gains.” Second, we restrict to Spectators with high posterior beliefs that the Recipient will choose cash. In the limit, if the Spectator believes that the Recipient never chooses the good over cash, welfarist preferences would imply that the Spectator never has a positive WTP for choice.

Elicitation 4. This elicitation informs Spectators that Y in {1, 5, 9} Recipients out of 10 have been granted the good via a lottery. We then elicit the WTP to provide an additional Recipient with the good. Y is randomized. The WTP is operationalized slightly differently: we inform the Spectator to choose between providing the good to the Recipient and donating money to a food bank.

The idea behind this elicitation is that Spectators with non-welfarist preferences may value giving all Recipients the good, due to “universalist” preferences. Thus, universalist preferences would predict a higher WTP when Y = 9 than when Y = 1 or Y = 5. Pure consequentialist preferences should have equal WTP for all N.

A key concern about this elicitation is that Spectators may generally have inequality aversion, even over the placebo good. Therefore, we employ a “difference in differences” specification, where we compare Y = 9 to Y = 1 and Y = 5, across both the treatment and placebo goods.

We conduct two secondary elicitations to further probe Elicitation 1.

Elicitation 1a. An important confound to Elicitation 1 is that participants may provide more of some goods if they believe that the implied price set by the total budget is a better deal for that good. For instance, if participants believe lawyers are valuable in expected value, then they may provide lawyers to everyone. To address this concern, we set the implied price of each good in Elicitation 1 to the median WTP in the pilot surveys. We also elicit the WTP for each good directly. We examine whether this price is below the amount that is given to the low-income tenant in Elicitation 1. Note that this elicitation is secondary, as it complements Elicitation 1.

Elicitation 1b. This elicitation proceeds in four parts. We only conduct it among the treatment group (those randomized into observing rights-based goods). First, we ask people prior beliefs about the effectiveness of legal assistance or health care. Second, we provide (truthful) information about different facts related to the effectiveness of legal assistance or health care. We sub-randomize people into a High or Low treatment, where the High treatment suggests that lawyers or health care is effective and the Low treatment does the opposite. Third, we ask Spectators whether they would like to revise their prior beliefs. Fourth, we ask Spectators whether they would like to revise their choice from Elicitation 1, and the direction that they would like to change their choice.

The purpose of Elicitation 1b is to understand the extent to which Spectators are influenced by welfarist concerns about the effectiveness of lawyers/health care. We therefore examine the share who revise and the magnitude of their revision. Secondary analyses may also use the change in beliefs to instrument for the effect of beliefs on targeting. If beliefs updates do not drive behaviors in Elicitation 1, that implies that targeting decisions are more driven by non-welfarist considerations.

Placebo randomization and pooling. The presentation for the health care treatment differs slightly from the lawyers treatment. For instance, we do not tell participants that health care will be incentivized (as it will not be). For this reason, we randomize participants who see placebo goods into seeing exactly what the health care people see, versus exactly what the lawyers see.

We present analyses that disaggregate lawyers and health care and compare them to each other and pooled placebos. We also present analyses that pool lawyers and health care. We typically pool placebos, and only in secondary analyses do we disaggregate them. We disaggregate cash in Elicitation 1 from the other placebos.

We typically pool all placebos (including those who see the health care versus lawyers presentation). In supplemental analyses we will disaggregate them. The difference in outcomes across placebos (holding fixed a specific good, but varying the presentational elements only) serves as a joint test for whether slight differences in presentation together with incentives affect results.

We acknowledge that (some) participants may view people as having the right to transportation (say), which means that treatment versus placebo comparisons serve as a lower bound.

Incentives. We incentivize the provision of lawyers by collaborating with a local nonprofit in Memphis, TN, that provides attorneys to tenants facing eviction. We incentivize the provision of bus passes and/or YMCA memberships similarly, if they are shown the same presentation as the lawyers. We incentivize belief elicitations in Elicitation 1b for lawyers only and Elicitation 3 for lawyers and placebo goods.

We do not incentivize provision of health care. As a secondary test, to examine the extent to which incentives matter, we do not incentivize a portion of the WTP for lawyers (Elicitation 1a), selected at random.
Randomization Method
Randomization done in Qualtrics.
Randomization Unit
Individual.
Was the treatment clustered?
No

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
1,800 individuals.
Sample size: planned number of observations
1,800 individuals.
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
Unless otherwise stated, participants are randomized throughout the entire experiment into the following goods: N = 600 into health care, N = 600 into lawyers, N = 600 into placebo (300 bus passes, 300 YMCA). Placebo goods are additionally cross-randomized into seeing the same presentation as health care (p = 0.5).

Elicitation 1: Goods are randomized as follows. N = 600 health care, N = 600 lawyers, N = 150 bus passes, N = 150 YMCA, N = 300 cash.
Elicitation 3: We additionally cross-randomize 900 into cash = 200 and 900 into cash = 300
Elicitation 4: We cross-randomize the number Y out of 10 who are receiving the good. Y is cross-randomized with the good. 900 randomized into Y = 9. 450 randomized into Y = 1. 450 randomized into Y = 5.
Elicitation 1b: We cross-randomize whether information provided is High or Low. 600 randomized into High. 600 randomized into Low.
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
We are powered to detect MDEs of 10 percentage points for binary outcomes. We are powered to detect MDEs of about 100 dollars (of the outside option) for universalism difference-in-differences.
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Committee on the Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects
IRB Approval Date
2023-08-14
IRB Approval Number
2112000534A005

Post-Trial

Post Trial Information

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Intervention

Is the intervention completed?
No
Data Collection Complete
Data Publication

Data Publication

Is public data available?
No

Program Files

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Reports & Other Materials