Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-nmvwc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-01T21:22:16.929Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Symposium: ethics of economic ordeals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2020

Nir Eyal  and
Anders Herlitz Open the ORCID record for Anders Herlitz [Opens in a new window]
Nir Eyal
Affiliation:
Rutgers University – the State University of New Jersey, 112 Paterson Street – Fourth Floor, New Brunswick, NJ08901, USA
Anders Herlitz*
Affiliation:
Institute for Futures Studies, Holländargatan 13, 101 31Stockholm, Sweden
*
*Corresponding author. Email: andersherlitz@gmail.com
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Economic ordeals are allocation mechanisms that impose non-financial ‘deadweight costs to qualify for a transfer’ (Nichols and Zeckhauser 1982: 372). Examples include long waiting times, travel and form-filling as conditions for certain healthcare services. Appropriately designed, ordeals can enhance target efficiency so that the goods being allocated better reach the intended recipients. The logic behind this is simple: ‘Say one welfare eligible would receive 100 utiles from a particular transfer, yet another would receive only 10. Then an ordeal that imposes an 11 utile loss in order to qualify for the transfer will be an effective sorting device’ (Nichols and Zeckhauser 1982: 376). In other words, recipients who would receive smaller benefits are expected to be dissuaded by the ordeal and refrain from requesting the good, whereas recipients who would receive larger benefits from the transfer are expected to seek out the good even if there is a deadweight cost. Moreover, unlike financial participation, which can similarly dissuade users with relatively little to gain from the good in question, ordeals are in no direct way financially regressive: the poor are not necessarily more dissuaded by losing time or by having to fill in a form than the rich are.

Type
Introduction
Information
Economics & Philosophy , Volume 37 , Special Issue 1: Special Issue on Ethics of Economic Ordeals , March 2021 , pp. 1 - 7
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alatas, V., Banerjee, A., Hanna, R., Olken, B.A. and Tobias, J. 2012. Targeting the poor: evidence from a field experiment in Indonesia. American Economic Review 102, 1206–1240.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cohen, G.A. 1989. On the currency of egalitarian justice. Ethics 99, 906–944.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dupas, P., Hoffmann, V., Kremer, M. and Zwane, A. Peterson 2016. Targeting health subsidies through a nonprice mechanism: a randomized control trial in Kenya. Science 353, 889–895.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Erickson, S.M., Rockwern, B., Koltov, M., McLean, R.M. and Medical Practice and Quality Committee of the American College of Physicians 2017. Putting patients first by reducing administrative tasks in health care: a position paper of the American College of Physicians. Annals of Internal Medicine 166, 659–661.10.7326/M16-2697CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Eyal, N. 2014. Nudging by shaming, shaming by nudging. International Journal of Health Policy and Management 3, 53–56.10.15171/ijhpm.2014.68CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Eyal, N., Romain, P.L. and Robertson, C. 2018. Can rationing through inconvenience be ethical? Hastings Center Report 48, 10–22.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gheaus, A. 2020. Ordeals, women and gender justice. Economics and Philosophy. doi: 10.1017/S0266267120000280.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grumet, G.W. 1989. Health care rationing through inconvenience: the third party’s secret weapon. New England Journal of Medicine 321, 607–611.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hausman, D.M. 2020. Ordeals, inequalities, moral hazard and non-monetary incentives in health care. Economics and Philosophy. doi: 10.1017/S0266267120000127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herlitz, A. 2020. Putting costs and benefits of ordeals together. Economics and Philosophy. doi: 10.1017/S0266267120000097.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Margalit, A. 1996: The Decent Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Nichols, A.L. and Zeckhauser, R.J. 1982. Targeting transfers through restrictions on recipients. American Economic Review 72, 372–377.Google Scholar
Nichols, D., Smolensky, E. and Tideman, T.N. 1971. Discrimination by waiting time in merit goods. American Economic Review 61, 312–323.Google Scholar
Olken, B.A. 2016. Hassles versus prices. Science 353, 864–865.10.1126/science.aah5055CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rose, J.L. 2016. Free Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.10.23943/princeton/9780691163451.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rose, J.L. 2020. Rationing with time: time-cost ordeals’ burdens and distributive effects. Economics and Philosophy. doi: 10.1017/S0266267120000103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zeckhauser, R.J. 2020. Strategic sorting: the role of ordeals in health care. Economics and Philosophy. doi: 10.1017/S0266267120000139.CrossRefGoogle Scholar