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Field experiments and public policy: festina lente

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2020

GLENN W. HARRISON
GLENN W. HARRISON*
Affiliation:
Department of Risk Management & Insurance and Center for the Economic Analysis of Risk, Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA School of Economics, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa
*
*Correspondence to: Department of Risk Management & Insurance and Center for the Economic Analysis of Risk, Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA. E-mail: gharrison@gsu.edu.
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Abstract

The current state of the art in field experiments does not give me any confidence that we should be assuming that we have anything worth scaling, assuming we really care about the expected welfare of those about to receive the instant intervention. At the very least, we should be honest and explicit about the need for strong priors about the welfare effects of changes in averages of observables to warrant scaling. What we need is a healthy dose of theory and the implied econometrics.

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Type
Articles
Information
Behavioural Public Policy , Volume 5 , Special Issue 1: Field Experiments and Public Policy , January 2021 , pp. 117 - 124
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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