Efficiency-Morality Trade-Offs in Repugnant Transactions: A Choice Experiment

We benefited from conversations with Sandro Ambuehl, Leo Burstzyn, Jon de Quidt, Liran Einav, Christine Exley, Ori Heffetz Alessandro Iaria, Jeffrey Kahn, Judd Kessler, Matt Mitchell, Matt Osborne, Gerard Padro i Miquel, Jim Rebitzer, Al Roth, Heather Royer, Stefanie Stantcheva and Justin Sydnor; and from the comments of the attendants of presentations at Duke University, Harvard Business School, LMU and Center for Economic Studies in Munich, McMaster University, University of Bologna, University of Bonn, University of Bristol, University of Toronto, the 2016 SITE Experimental Economics Workshop, the Workshop on Natural Experiments and Controlled Field Trials in Munich, the American Society of Health Economists’ meetings in Philadelphia, the Southern Economic Association meetings in New Orleans, and the Conference on The Ethics of Bodily Commodification at The College of New Jersey. We received ethics approval from the Research Ethics Board at the University of Toronto (protocol 30238) and the Homewood Institutional Review Board at Johns Hopkins University (protocol 00001991); the registration number at the American Economic Association’s Registry for Randomized Controlled Trials is AEARCTR-00007. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Johns Hopkins University Catalyst Award, a sub-grant from the research program “The Economics of Knowledge Contribution and Distribution” (funded by the Sloan Foundation), and a Research and Scholarly Fund grant from the University of Toronto Mississauga. Nicola Lacetera is thankful to the Center for Economic Studies in Munich for the hospitality during the development of part of this study. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• September 11, 2016