Second-Best Fairness: The Trade-Off between False Positives and False Negatives
通过美国和挪威的大规模实验，研究人们在次优情境下对假阳性（多给）和假阴性（少给）的公平偏好，发现多数人更关注假阴性，但偏好因国家和政治立场而异，为理解社会保险和再分配的政治经济学提供新证据。
A main focus in economics is how to design optimal policies in second-best situations, which often requires a trade-off between giving some individuals more than they deserve, false positives, and others less than they deserve, false negatives. This paper provides novel evidence on people’s second-best fairness preferences from large-scale experimental studies in the United States and Norway. The majority of people are more concerned with false negatives than with false positives, but we document substantial heterogeneity in second-best fairness preferences between the countries and across the political spectrum. The findings shed light on the political economy of social insurance and redistribution.