Rituals of Reason: Experimental Evidence on the Social Acceptability of Lotteries in Allocation Problems

Résumé 0

Procedures designed by economists to optimally allocate scarce resources such as school places for students typically rely on the use of lotteries as a tie breaker. This feature is often criticized by the rest of society and has blocked the implementation of many of those procedures. In this paper, we study collective preferences towards the use of random procedures in allocation mechanisms. We report the results of two incentivized experiments in which subjects choose a procedure to allocate a reward to half of them. The first possibility is an explicitly random device: the result of a lottery. The second is an equally unpredictable procedure with identical rate of success, but not involving any explicit randomization. We identify an aversion to lotteries, in particular against procedures that are reminiscent of meritocratic ones. In line with the literature, we also find evidence of a control premium in most procedures. Our results provide a simple guidance to make random tie-breakers more socially acceptable: use equally unpredictable procedures that are not explicitly lotteries, and give participants control on the procedure.