Conference Agenda

Over the past two decades, the power of randomization through carefully designed policy experiments has gained traction in the social sciences, including environmental and energy economics. Despite their growing popularity among researchers, most government policies are still designed and implemented without consulting evidence from prior experimentation, often actively resisting the idea of controlled trials. ``Experiment aversion', that is, people's moral objection to policy experimentation, has been proposed as an explanation. Here we demonstrate -- in the context of energy efficiency assistance program -- people's capacity for trading off possible moral objections against the benefits of policy experimentation, both as members of the public and as policy-makers and experts. In our main study, members of the general public made a real and consequential decision on how 200 low-income households would be treated in an ongoing field trial of an assistance program. Only 38 percent of participants had rated experimentation as morally appropriate in this context in a corresponding vignette study. Yet, 72 percent of participants chose the policy experiment in the real decision. Replicating the design with policy-makers and experts, 67 percent chose the policy experiment. We hypothesize that the phenomenon of ``experiment aversion' reflects the nature of vignette designs and its focus on moral objections rather than genuine preferences about policy experimentation and find supporting evidence.