Microeconomics SeminarHow Europeans look at the asylum system: an experiment on the role of self-interest, fairness, and communicationMichal Krawczyk (University of Warsaw), 17:15--18:30, Room 0079 (VMP 5)

12 June 2025, 5:15 pm

Abstract:  This pre-registered study, an extension of Bansak (2017), explores perceptions of the asylum system, focusing on the role of self-interest, fairness, and communication. We ask the participants – representative samples in eight EU countries – to rank fairness of three methods of allocating asylum seekers: no relocation, allocation proportional to each country’s GDP, allocation proportional to each country’s population. We find that nearly three-quarters of participants find some form of relocation most fair. However, there are important country differences. These are consistent with a self-serving bias: the tendency to judge the method that results in relatively few asylum seekers in one’s own country as fair. Moreover, communication strategies randomised as treatments significantly moderate this tendency. Explicitly spelling out the consequences of implementation of each method in absolute terms (how many thousands of asylum seekers are to be expected in participant’s country per year) significantly strengthens the self-serving bias. The same information presented in relative terms (per 100 thousand local inhabitants), showing that the number of asylum seekers is generally small, has a weaker effect.