TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Ghidoni, Riccardo
AU  - Immordino, Giovanni
AU  - Roberti, Paolo
        TI  - A Remedy to the Demand for Bad Policy
        PY  - 2026/May/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 18695
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp18695
        AB  - Voters often oppose welfare-enhancing policies because they fail to anticipate how others will adjust their behavior. We show that policy design can align political support with efficiency even under biased beliefs. We study priority policies, a remedy whose off-equilibrium incentives make reform attractive even to biased voters. In a theory-guided experiment, participants vote between an inefficient status quo and a treatment-specific welfare-improving reform. A Pigouvian-like tax attracts only 27.5 percent support; adding priority incentives raises it to 41.7 percent, and a pure-priority policy raises it to 70 percent. Treatment effects are mostly driven by biased participants.
        KW  - reform
KW  - priority policy
KW  - voting
KW  - political failure
KW  - experiment
        ER  -