Econ Papers Daily / 期刊论文
个性化政策的机制设计：一项激励运动的实地实验
Mechanism Design for Personalized Policy: A Field Experiment Incentivizing Exercise
摘要
Personalizing policies can theoretically increase their effectiveness. However, personalization is difficult when individual types are unobservable and the preferences of policymakers and individuals are not aligned, which could cause individuals to misreport their type. Mechanism design offers a strategy to overcome this issue: offer an “incentive‐compatible” menu of policy choices designed to induce participants to select the variant intended for their type. Using a field experiment that personalized incentives for exercise among 6,800 adults with diabetes and hypertension in urban India, we show that personalizing with an incentive‐compatible choice menu substantially improves program performance, increasing the treatment effect of incentives on exercise by 80% without increasing incentive costs relative to a one‐size‐fits‐all benchmark. Offering choice achieves similar performance to personalizing with an extensive set of observable variables, but without the same data requirements.
中文摘要
个性化政策在理论上可以提升其有效性。然而，当个体类型不可观测，且政策制定者与个体的偏好不一致时，个性化难以实现，因为这可能导致个体虚报其类型。机制设计提供了一种解决该问题的策略：提供一份“激励相容”的政策选择菜单，旨在引导参与者选择针对其类型设计的方案。通过在印度城市地区对6800名患有糖尿病和高血压的成年人进行一项实地实验，我们证明，采用激励相容的选择菜单进行个性化激励，能显著提升项目绩效：与一刀切的基准方案相比，在不增加激励成本的情况下，将激励对锻炼的处理效应提高了80%。提供选择菜单所达到的效果，与利用大量可观测变量进行个性化处理的效果相当，但无需相同的数据要求。