Distributional preference divergence in targeting foreign aid: Experimental evidence from aid workers, refugees, and a proxy means test in a humanitarian setting

Aid institutions delivering social assistance balance donors’ conceptions of appropriate program design with the need to maintain legitimacy among local beneficiaries. We present a conceptual framework for institutional targeting under dual accountability constraints and apply it to the case of cash transfer targeting among Syrian refugees in Lebanon. We recover distributional preferences for beneficiary selection in a discrete choice conjoint experiment given to humanitarian staff and refugees, and extract implicit preferences from the econometric proxy means test used in practice. Human respondents prioritize visible forms of vulnerability, while formal targeting models emphasize demographic predictors of expenditure. We find that donor compliance pressures outweigh legitimacy costs in shaping institutional behavior. The paper contributes to debates on governance, accountability, and institutional legitimacy in humanitarian and foreign aid settings.

Keywords: cash transfers; targeting; humanitarian assistance; refugees; conjoint analysis; proxy means test; institutional legitimacy; principal-agent problems.

JEL: I18, O15, D63, D73, F22.