# 1 Introduction

Trust is an essential ingredient of altruistic behavior. A growing body of literature emphasizes its importance in shaping individual decisions to support the provision of public goods. In a prominent example, a social experiment found that charitable provision was significantly lower if the solicitors of contributions belonged to a minority group that inspired a lower level of trust among potential donors (List and Price 2009). This behavior can be explained by a principal-agent problem: the principal (i.e. potential donor) can choose, under no obligation, whether to give money to benefit a group on whose behalf the agent (i.e. donation solicitor) is purportedly acting. The agent’s optimal strategy is to provide the principal with credible signals that the transferred resources will be used as the principal intends. Mechanisms that enhance the credibility of principal-agent transactions can be particularly important in securing support for public goods, including those that benefit only a subset of the population– such as redistributive policies.<sup>1</sup> Obtaining citizens’support for redistributive policies may be especially important in countries where resources are scarce and governments historically enjoy little public trust in their capacity to deliver goods and services fairly and effi ciently.<sup>2</sup> In fact, even in nondemocratic regimes, citizens have ways to retaliate against unpopular use of public funds or to try to control rent-seeking (Acemoglu, Hassan, and Tahoun 2014). But while there are high expectations about the positive effects of increased transparency on citizens’ trust in – and therefore their support for – redistributive policies, there is a dearth of rigorous evidence on this topic.

In this paper, we offer experimental evidence on the effect of trust-enhancing measures on public support for redistributive policies. We conducted a behavioral experiment on a nationally representative sample of the middle class in Jordan– the Jordan Gives experiment– to identify the effect of enhanced transparency on the support for, and the preferred design of, social safety nets.<sup>3</sup> The experiment involved a nationallyrepresentative sample of 420 participants recruited from 21 middle-class primary sampling units (PSUs) (ie localities) across Jordan; within each PSU, participants were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups of 10 subjects. Each participant received a fuel voucher roughly comparable to the daily minimum wage.<sup>4</sup> Participants in the control

> 1 For example, the literature has established that trust in the goverment is an important determinant of compliance with taxation obligations of citizens and firms (Barone and Mocetti 2011; Friedman, Johnson, and Kaufmann 2000; Johnson et al. 2000; Silverman, Slemrod, and Uler 2014).

> 2 A government’s failure to provide such credibility could affect the provision of public goods in different forms: in more mature democracies through voting outcomes, and in other cases, through tax evasion, exercise of corruption, or public protest.

> 3 Social safety nets (SSNs), also known as social assistance or welfare schemes, are defined as noncontributory transfers targeted to the poor or vulnerable. They include income or in-kind support and can be made conditional on certain behaviors of recipients’households (e.g. conditional cash transfers, CCTs) or provided without any conditions (e.g. unconditional cash transfers, UCTs) (Grosh et al. 2008, World Bank 2009).

> 4 The experiment was followed by a Becker, DeGroot, and Marschak (1964) auction to establish valuation

2