Yoan Hermstrüwer and Pascal Langenbach

How fair are government decisions based on algorithmic predictions? And to what extent can governments delegate decisions to machines without sacrificing procedural fairness or acting against the citizens’ preferences? Using a set of vignettes, we explore how different procedural designs affect the perceptions and procedural preferences of citizens. Varying the extent of delegation to the machine and the degree of human control over the de- cision and the decision procedure, we implement four different treatments, ranging from full human discretion, machine-based predictions with high human control, machine-based predictions with low human control, and fully machine-based decisions.