中文摘要
我们研究这样一个问题：政策制定者需要根据个体从政策干预中获得的社会福利增益中不可观测的异质性，对自我选择的个体进行筛选。在我们的框架中，边际处理效应和边际处理响应是刻画社会福利的关键统计量。我们将这一框架应用于一项关于电力方案选择的随机田野实验。消费者被提供了能改善福利的动态定价方案，并被随机分配了参与激励。我们发现，价格弹性较高的消费者——其产生的福利增益更大——更倾向于自我选择。我们的反事实模拟量化了最优的参与激励，这些激励利用了选择与福利增益中可观测与不可观测的异质性。(JEL C93, D12, L11, L94, L98)
Abstract
We study a problem in which policymakers need to screen self-selected individuals by unobserved heterogeneity in social welfare gains from a policy intervention. In our framework, the marginal treatment effects and marginal treatment responses arise as key statistics to characterize social welfare. We apply this framework to a randomized field experiment on electricity plan choice. Consumers were offered welfare-improving dynamic pricing with randomly assigned take-up incentives. We find that price-elastic consumers—who generate larger welfare gains—are more likely to self-select. Our counterfactual simulations quantify the optimal take-up incentives that exploit observed and unobserved heterogeneity in selection and welfare gains. (JEL C93, D12, L11, L94, L98)