Oberlin College and Conservatory

Selection on Welfare Gains and Policy Design: Experimental Evidence from Electricity Plan Choice

Friday, December 13, 2019 at 12:00pm

King Building, 337
10 North Professor Street, Oberlin, OH 44074

‘‘Selection on Welfare Gains and Policy Design: Experimental Evidence from Electricity Plan Choice,’’ presented by Koichiro Ito  of the University of Chicago.

We study a problem where policymakers need to screen self-selected individuals by unobserved heterogeneity in potential welfare gains from a policy intervention. In our framework, the marginal treatment effects arise as a key statistic to characterize social welfare. We apply this framework to a randomized field experiment on electricity plan choice.

Consumers were offered socially-efficient dynamic pricing with randomly-assigned take-up incentives. We find that price-elastic consumers—who would generate larger social welfare gains—are more likely to self-select. We simulate policy counterfactuals and quantify the optimal take-up incentives that exploit both observed and unobserved heterogeneity in selection and welfare gains.

Sponsored by the Department of Economics Danforth-Lewis Speakers Series.

Event Type

Lectures/Symposia/Workshops

Departments

Academic, Economics

Website

https://harris.uchicago.edu/directory...

Contact Person

Terri Pleska, Administrative Assistant

Contact Phone Number

440-775-8483

Contact E-mail Address

terri.pleska@oberlin.edu

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