Understanding social support for markets and “just prices”

Our study will be based on an online experimental survey with respondents randomly assigned to different conditions. Our sample will include 4,000 Americans and 4,000 Canadians and it will be representative of the respective populations in terms of gender, race and ethnicity, age, and educational attainment. We will rely on the survey company Respondy for the recruitment.

A QSF file of the survey, reporting all conditions, is attached (not public), including the US version of the survey. The Canadian version is identical with just a few exceptions, to adapt it to the different institutional and geographical context (the questions about residence list Canadian provinces instead of US states, the questions about voting behavior in the most recent election concern the parliamentary elections in 2019 instead of the 2020 US presidential elections, and so on).

In addition to an initial set of screening questions where we establish quotas to make the sample representative in terms of age, educational attainment, gender, and race/ethnicity, the survey has five parts.

Part 1 of the survey will include general information as well as walk informed consent text.

Part 2 will include socio-demographic questions.

Part 3 represents the main randomized intervention. In this part, each respondent will evaluate the morality of and express their policy preference between two scenarios, one where the price of a product is fully determined by a company (or "the market"), and one in which a public authority imposes a price cap.

In part 4, we will ask participants about their opinions on the role of the markets and the government in an economy, and the extent to which they think the government should intervene to guarantee access to certain products. There will also be a trolley problem- like dilemma in this part.

In part 5, participants will answer questions about their time preferences, general trust in others, and pro-social preferences. With a probability of 1/4, respondents will also have the opportunity to donate $1 to a foundation that promotes free, unfettered markets. More specifically, participants will gain $1 if they allow the researchers to donate $1 to this organization.

2021-04-28

2021-06-30

Our primary outcome of interest is the proportion of respondents, for each condition, who select the unregulated pricing scenario as their preferred one. We are also interested in the moral views of the respondents for each scenario.

In addition to asking to select one of the two scenarios as their preferred policy, the survey will also include an open text question where the respondents will motivate their choice. We plan to perform some text analyses (word frequencies, sentiment analysis, etc.) on these motivations.

We will also assess the consistency between the state choices of a scenario and the donation choice for the respondents assigned to having the donation opportunity. In particular, we want to see whether those who prefer the free pricing option ae more likely to donate to the foundation that promotes unfettered markets.

Finally, we will determine to what extent the main outcomes of interest depend on overall attitudes toward market and governments, and whether the moral views on he specific scenarios correlate with the scenario choices.

The experimental components of the survey will concern part 3 and part 5 described above.

In Part 3 of the survey, we will randomly assign each respondent to a scenario defined as a combination of the following elements: One of four products (a pharmaceutical drug, a treadmill for home use, hand sanitizer, hand moisturizer); the salience of "demand factors" (increase in demand) or "supply factors" (increase in unit costs) as causes of the price increase; the origin of the shock being a pandemic disease or left unspecified; specification of the consequences in terms of share of the market served and prices, or no specification of such consequences. For each product, there will also be a condition where each of the two scenarios (with or without the imposition of a price cap) will only report the fact that a company increased the price of the good (and in the price-cap case, that the government then imposes a cap), without any of the explanations reported above. Each participant will be randomly assigned only one scenario.

In part 5, participants will answer questions about their time preferences, general trust in others, and pro-social preferences. With a probability of 1/4, respondents will also have the opportunity to donate $1 to a foundation that promotes free, unfettered markets. More specifically, participants will gain $1 if they allow the researchers to donate $1 to this organization.

We will run our survey on Qualtrics and rely on their randomization procedure.

Individual

No

We will survey 4000 US residents and 4000 residents in Canada

8000

Each treatment arm will occur with equal probability.