Experimental Design
The survey will be run through Prolific. It will be based on a sample representative of the US in terms of age, education and origin. We will survey 2,000 respondents.
Each respondent will be asked for their opinions on a range of ten, topical economic policy issues. Respondents will be shown a set of statements and asked, for each statement, whether they agree/ disagree, or are uncertain, using the Likert scale. This design, and the statements themselves, are taken from the Chicago Booth Economist Expert Panel (https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/us-economic-experts-panel/)
The ten statements have been chosen to reflect a range of different policy areas. They also represent a mix of technical/ non-technical issues (Ballard and Johnston find that citizens give more weight to expert opinion on more technical issues). They are also issues where there is a mix of opinions among the expert economists (agree/ uncertain/ disagree), enabling us to show different opinions on the same issue.
The ten statements are:
1. Use of artificial intelligence over the next ten years will lead to a substantial increase in the growth rates of real per capita income in the US and Western Europe over the subsequent two decades.
2. There needs to be more government regulation around Twitter’s content moderation and personal data protection.
3. It would serve the US economy well to make it unlawful for companies with revenues over $1 billion to offer goods or services for sale at an excessive price during an exceptional market shock.
4. Efforts to achieve the goal of reaching net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050 will be a major drag on global economic growth.
5. Given the centrality of semiconductors to the manufacturing of many products, securing reliable supplies should be a key strategic objective of national policy.
6. A significant factor behind today’s higher US inflation is dominant corporations in uncompetitive markets taking advantage of their market power to raise prices.
7. Financial regulators in the US and Europe lack the tools and authority to deter runs on banks by uninsured depositors.
8. When economic policy-makers are unable to commit credibly in advance to a specific decision rule, they will often follow a poor policy trajectory.
9. A windfall tax on the profits of large oil companies ‚ with the revenue rebated to households‚ would provide an efficient means to protect the average US household.
10. A ban on advertising junk foods (those that are high in sugar, salt, and fat) would be an effective policy to reduce child obesity.
The instructions to the respondents will be the following:
This is a survey to collect opinions from members of the public on economic policy issues. Everyone is affected by what is happening in the economy – so we want to know what you think about the issues. The real-world topics covered by the questions include climate change, working from home, twitter and artificial intelligence, so you don’t need a background in economics – just give us your opinion.
The answers will be used for research purposes. Your participation in the survey is voluntary and you can stop at any stage. You may withdraw your participation at any time by sending an email with your participant ID to
[email protected] and we will delete all data recorded on this ID. We will ask you questions about your background, including age, ethnic origin, and gender. You can choose not to answer a specific question if you prefer not to. All data will be stored anonymously and securely at the University of Bristol, and only members of the research team will be able to access it. The legal basis for collecting and processing this information is legitimate interest (Article 6(1)(f)) of the General Data Protection Regulation 2018). We will never publish any information that could let people figure out who you are. In line with best practice for research, once our study is finished, we will securely archive your information (without any personal information) for other researchers to use in the future.
Before asking for their opinions, we will collect the following demographic information:
• Age (bands)
• Gender
• Ethnicity
• Highest education qualification
• Self-assessed economics knowledge.
Respondents will then be asked their opinions, with the following instructions:
You will now see ten statements about topical, economic policy issues and you will see the opinion of an expert economist who has been asked the same questions, for comparison. We would like to know your opinion on the issues. There are no right or wrong answers. Tell us, for each of the statements whether you agree/ disagree or are uncertain.
The respondents will see the opinion of a (randomly- selected male or female) expert from a sub-sample of the EEP panel. We will also provide the expert's name and a photo. We will not show the name of the institution.
Treatment
The expert opinions will not be selected at random from the entire panel – this would lead to relatively few female expert opinions being selected. Instead, we will pre-select a sub-sample of female and male expert opinions from which to randomly select opinions. This will be based on the following rules:
• First, select all the opinions from female experts who responded to the question
• Second, select male matches (by opinion) for each of the female expert views. This matched sample is gender-balanced by construction with male and female experts with the same views, on average.
From this, matched sample, we will randomly select 10 expert opinions (one per question) for each respondent to see.
Experimental Design Details