ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on policy experiments, particularly pilots, as a policy tool to aid such decision-making. Policy pilots are commonly deployed to test policies before their full-scale rollout. The chapter focuses on the ability of pilots in aiding decisions to scale up of experimental policy initiatives. As policymakers move from policy formulation to decision-making, they are faced with the task of choosing a course of action from among a few plausible alternatives to address the policy issue at hand. Policymakers face a spectrum of such uncertainty that moves from limited knowledge about the future to the deepest layer of uncertainty or total ignorance, sometimes expressed as ‘unknown unknowns’. The chapter concludes with recommendations for effectively using piloting as a decision-making tool and suggestions for future research in this direction.
