Cellfare: Delivering Self-Targeted Welfare Using Mobile Phones

This paper proposes a new form of social welfare: beneficiaries carry out a series of small tasks on their mobile phones, each linked to a small payment. Key advantages over traditional public works, or workfare, are large potential reductions in leakage as well in administrative costs and delays. A basic implementation of the scheme was tested in the field, and participants with experience from a large Indian public-works programme favourably compared the proposed scheme to the existing one. There are potential challenges related to automation.