Experimental methods and the welfare evaluation of policy lotteries
政策效果不确定，相当于给个体施加了结果抽彩。本文梳理了用实验方法评估政策的两种路径：估计个体偏好与信念作为先验，或通过随机化推断政策效应，并比较了各自的优劣与互补性。
Policies impose lotteries of outcomes on individuals, since we never know exactly what the effects of the policy will be. In order to evaluate alternative policies, we need to make assumptions about individual preferences, even before social welfare functions are applied. There are two broad ways in which experimental methods are used to evaluate policy. One is to use experiments to estimate individual preferences, valuations and beliefs and use those estimates as priors in policy evaluation. The other is to use randomisation to infer the effects of policy. The strengths, weaknesses and complementarities of these approaches are reviewed.