Partition dependence in financial aid distribution to income categories.

Chenmu Xing,Hilary Barth,Jamie Hom,Meghana Kandlur,Ray Alexander,Katherine Williams,Elizabeth Shackney,Joanna Paul,Praise Owoyemi,Valerio Capraro

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0231135

Abstract

When allocating resources, people often diversify across categories even when those categories are arbitrary, such that allocations differ when identical sets of options are partitioned differently (“partition dependence”). The first goal of the present work (Experiment 1) was to replicate an experiment by Fox and colleagues in which graduate students exhibited partition dependence when asked how university financial aid should be allocated across arbitrarily partitioned income brackets. Our sample consisted of community members at a liberal arts college where financial aid practices have been recent topics of debate. Because stronger intrinsic preferences can reduce partition dependence, these participants might display little partition dependence with financial aid allocations. Alternatively, a demonstration of strong partition dependence in this population would emphasize the robustness of the effect. The second goal was to extend a “high transparency” modification to the present task context (Experiment 2) in which participants were shown both possible income partitions and randomly assigned themselves to one, to determine whether partition dependence in this paradigm would be reduced by revealing the study design (and the arbitrariness of income categories). Participants demonstrated clear partition dependence in both experiments. Results demonstrate the robustness of partition dependence in this context.

Highlights

Grouping the same set of options in different ways will alter the way people choose from or distribute resources to different options [1]
People may diversify their choices over both individual options and over arbitrary or subjective groupings of options, and because of this, different groupings can lead to different choices: a phenomenon called partition dependence [1, 5]
Like Fox and colleagues [1], we found that participants in both the low and high income partition conditions preferred to give more money to families with lower income levels: the lowest income category received the greatest mean percentage, and increasing income levels were given monotonically decreased mean percentages

Summary

Introduction

Grouping the same set of options in different ways will alter the way people choose from or distribute resources to different options [1]. When adults are asked to choose from a menu of options, they often employ a diversification heuristic and vary their selections across the options that are provided [2,3,4]. People may diversify their choices over both individual options and over arbitrary or subjective groupings of options, and because of this, different groupings can lead to different choices: a phenomenon called partition dependence [1, 5]. Partition dependence has been demonstrated across a wide range of contexts in adults (e.g., [1, 6]), and, recently, in a study of resource allocation by children [7].

Objectives

Methods

Results