 Understanding and increasing policymakers’ sensitivity to program impactMattie Toma and Elizabeth Bell Journal of Public Economics, 2024, vol. 234, issue C Abstract: Policymakers routinely make high-stakes funding decisions. Assessing the value of a program is difficult and may be affected by bounded rationality. We conducted experiments involving U.S. policymakers and the general public, in which participants were given the opportunity to assess the value of various policy programs. Our findings demonstrate that decision aids enhance the responsiveness of respondents to the impact of the programs. We designed and tested two portable decision aids—one that compares programs side-by-side and another that aggregates multiple features of impact into a single metric. The two decision aids increase the elasticity of assessments of program value with respect to impact by 0.20 on a base of 0.33 among policymakers and by 0.21 on a base of 0.21 among the general public. We provide evidence that the cognitive difficulty of translating impact-relevant information into policy decisions helps explain our findings. Keywords: Policymakers; Bounded rationality; Experiments; Program impact (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:pubeco:v:234:y:2024:i:c:s004727272400032x DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2024.105096 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Public Economics is currently edited by R. Boadway and J. Poterba More articles in Journal of Public Economics from Elsevier |
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