Free to Fail? Paternalistic Preferences in the United States

Abstract This paper examines paternalistic preferences in two large-scale experiments with participants from the US general population. Participants decide whether to intervene when a stakeholder is about to make a choice misaligned with the stakeholder’s own preferences. Willingness to intervene depends on which intervention is available: only a minority implements a hard intervention, which restricts the stakeholder’s choice set, while a majority implements a soft intervention that provides information without restricting choice. A substantial share of participants does not defer to the stakeholder’s stated preferences when evaluating welfare. Our framework estimates that about half are welfarists and a third libertarian paternalists.