Randomization of What? Moving from Libertarian to "Democratic Paternalism". GREDEG Working Papers Series

Les opinions exprimées dans la série des Documents de travail GREDEG sont celles des auteurs et ne reflèlent pas nécessairement celles de l'institution. Les documents n'ont pas été soumis à un rapport formel et sont donc inclus dans cette série pour obtenir des commentaires et encourager la discussion. Les droits sur les documents appartiennent aux auteurs. within the J-PAL, promote the use of randomization as an efficient way of fighting poverty. Mainly, J-PAL's project aims at testing what can be assimilated to nudging devices through randomization. Nevertheless, Duflo recently changed her perspective from a kind of libertarian paternalism toward a stronger paternalistic view. The paper methodologically explains such a shift through the incapacity of J-PAL's use of randomization to give access to the whole process of poverty since it focuses only on the individual decision-making process. Our claim in this paper is that this shift for a stronger paternalism can be explained by a twofold failure of focusing only on the use of randomization: (1) the incapacity to show how individual behaviors are related to poverty, (2) randomization alone does not give access to an important determinant of the decision-making process, namely the social framework that embeds it.