group had to decide whether to give to people in need, without expecting anything in return. Participants in the treatment group were given the opportunity to verify whether their transfers actually reached poor individuals.

Our experimental design simulates at the micro level the choice faced by middle-class citizens on whether to support a shift of public resources toward targeted interventions that benefit the poor, under different designs of those interventions and different degrees of certainty about the delivery of the benefits to the intended recipients. The experiment thus allows us to provide rigorous evidence on: (1) the propensity for redistribution and relative support for different redistributive methods; and (2) the underlying impact of transparency and trust on redistributive preferences. In doing so, this paper bridges the gap between evidence obtained from traditional opinion surveys and the behavioral literature.

We have two main sets of results. First, although the effect of transparency on altruism is not statistically significant for the whole sample, the transparency-enhancing treatment caused significant increases in the support for redistribution among two groups of participants: “low-trust” individuals and “youth.” The first group consists of individuals who needed a credible signal of trustworthiness in order to exhibit altruism– people who were ex ante suspicious about the implementation of social safety nets. In the control group, such low-trust individuals were significantly less likely to give to the poor than individuals who trusted that social safety nets reach the intended beneficiaries. In the treatment group, on the other hand, the giving rate of low-trust individuals matched that of high-trust participants, suggesting that the transparency-enhancing treatment mitigated the effect of their initial mistrust on altruistic behavior. The second group– youth, defined with different age thresholds– represents those least likely to give to the poor in the absence of the material guarantees of delivery. With increased transparency, this group experienced the highest increase in the rate of giving.

Second, we provide evidence that the transparency-enhancing treatment particularly increased redistribution to the poor through unconditional cash transfers as opposed to in-kind or conditional cash transfers. In the control group, unconditional in-kind transfers were equally preferred to unconditional cash transfers. The treatment group, however, had higher rates of giving through unconditional cash transfers, which became the most popular benefit delivery option. In sum, enhancing transparency of delivery increased the support for the delivery option– cash– that is generally considered most effi cient in reducing poverty relative to in-kind benefits. In fact, recent opinion surveys in four Arab countries, including Jordan, showed that the majority of the poor prefer cash-based transfers to in-kind benefits (Silva, Levin, and Morgandi 2013).<sup>5</sup> However, in the absence of of the fuel voucher. This type of auction is a mechanisms commonly used in the literature to induce individuals to reveal their willingness to pay for a given good (Noussair, Robin , and Ruffl ieux 2004). It showed that 95 percent of the participants considered the fuel vouchers to be equivalent to cash. 5 The other countries surveyed were the Arab Republic of Egypt, Lebanon, and Tunisia.

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