How much do our neighbors really know? The limits of community-based targeting
通过中爪哇的实验室实验，检验社区成员能否比中央政策实施者更好地捕捉邻居的暂时性冲击，结果发现社区福利信息并未更好反映暂时性冲击，瞄准决策主要依赖对总体财富的感知差异。
Social assistance programs in developing countries often rely on local community members to identify potential beneficiaries. As community members may observe neighbors’ welfare, their reports may capture transitory shocks better than the proxies typically observable by a centralized policy implementer. To test this, we conduct a lab-style experiment in Central Java, in which participants rank other community members’ welfare, using benchmarks that vary in sensitivity to transitory shocks, and target small cash transfers. We find little evidence that community-held welfare information better reflects transitory shocks and find that targeting decisions mostly depend on perceived differences in overall wealth.