Experimental Design Details
This experiment will examine the impact of information type and transparency on allocations made by policymakers at governmental and non-governmental agencies in Nepal. The experiment will follow a 4 (Information type: Control, Placebo, Need, Aid) x 2 (Transparency: Private vs. Transparent decisions).
Information type will be manipulated by providing subjects with maps depicting different types of information about the regions to which aid they can allocate aid (described in further detail below). After viewing maps in each condition, will decide how much of a hypothetical US $30 million allocation to distribute to each of ten districts presented. Participants will be informed that they will be paid for their participation in the study, and will be able to donate all or some of their payment based on the actual proportion they decided to contribute in one of the conditions (randomly chosen at the end of the study).
In the first part of the study (the private decision treatment) all participants will first complete a control condition. This condition will serve as a baseline to examine the impact of the other treatment conditions. In the control condition, the map shown to participants will not contain any information, and will simply depict the ten regions to which aid can be allocated.
After the control condition, participants will then complete the aid allocations under three additional information treatments: Aid, Need, and Placebo. In the Aid condition, participants will be shown maps indicating how much Aid funding had been provided to each of the ten districts by the Prime Minister’s relief. In the Need condition, participants will be shown maps indicating the total value of disaster effects for each of the ten districts. Finally, in the Placebo condition, participants will be shown maps with information irrelevant to aid allocations, in this case, the percentage of children receiving recommended vaccinations in each district. These three conditions will be presented in random order following the control condition.
The second part of the study consists of a ‘transparency’ treatment. In this part of the study, participants will be informed that their names and decisions will be made public in the final report of the study, without any other demographic or survey response information. Only the decisions of the participants in the ‘transparency’ condition will have identifying information (specifically, the participant’s name and the districts they contributed aid resources to), and this will only be done with the full consent of the participant. Participants will opt into the second part of the study, and informed consent will be separately obtained from participants. In this condition, participants will complete aid allocations for each of the above conditions (Control, Aid, Need, Placebo) under conditions of transparency. As in the non-transparency condition, participants will first complete the control condition, and then the following three conditions will be presented in random order. Participants who choose not to opt into the transparency condition for any reason will also complete these four conditions, but will be asked to make their decisions imagining that their decisions would be made public.
After all allocation tasks have been completed, participants will be given their payment (Rs. 3000), and will have the opportunity to donate all or portion of their payment, in increments of Rs. 300. This donation will be split amongst the districts according to percentages from the one of the eight allocation tasks participants, randomly chosen. The donated amount will be provided to the regions via partner aid organizations.
Prior to and following the eight allocation decision tasks, participants will fill out brief questionnaires. Prior to beginning the study participants will answer questions regarding the organization which they are employed at, as well a several questions assessing how much they were affected by the 2015 earthquake. The pre-experiment survey will also assess participants’ attitudes toward the Government of Nepal, International Aid Agencies, and Civil Society. Next, the participants will be asked to indicate whether they have visited each district to be included as an allocation target, and rank each district according to how much they think each district was impacted by the disaster and how much aid they think each district received. Following the allocations decision tasks, participants will fill out a separate short survey assessing attitudes regarding transparency, and beliefs about the level of transparency in the international aid agencies, the Nepal government, and civil society. They will also fill out a short scale asking participants to rate factors (i.e., concern for reputation, responsibility felt toward affiliated districts, the extent to which they considered data provided in the maps, trust in the map information, and strategic concerns) they considered while making allocation decisions.