Does every life count the same? Evidence from a Triage Experiment

This paper elicits citizen preferences in the moral dilemma of triage decisions. The experiment is framed in the context of the looming consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on resource allocation in German hospitals. We aim to identify key heuristics applied in the population to make these ethically difficult choices and how they vary across subpopulations. We investigate to what extent people do not discriminate and base their choices on the patients’ chances of survival, to what extent they base their decisions on utilitarian considerations and to what extent they give preference to patients that belong to their in-group. The analyses focus among others on discrimination against immigrants. The analyses are based on 23 waves of an online rolling cross-sectional survey with around 17’000 respondents in Germany between April 2020 and March 2021. More detailed analyses explore how preference structures vary over time and space conditional on regional numbers of corona cases.