Economic juries and public project provision

Abstract

Juries charged with evaluating economic policy alternatives are the focus of this study. The recruitment and management of juries is a principal–agent problem involving the design of incentive mechanisms for participation and truthful revelation of values. This paper considers a simple general equilibrium economy in which juries of consumers are used to estimate the value of public projects and determine their provision. The impact of participation fees on jury selection and representativeness, and on statistical mitigation of response errors, is analyzed. Manski set identification is used to bound selection bias and determine participation fee treatments that minimize welfare regret from imperfect jury findings.