Support and sanctions for recipients of social assistance benefits are designed to serve a number of different purposes at the same time: protecting households against poverty, offer support to benefit recipients to contribute to society, and ensure that the system is sustainable, affordable and enjoys societal support. In the Netherlands, there is a discrepancy between the aims detailed by the legislator in the so-called Participatiewet and the actual practice by case managers. There is a need for better knowledge about how to combine and balance the different purposes that social assistance schemes should serve. This research project aims at providing such knowledge, by introducing the state-of-the-art discrete choice experiment methodology to the field of the design of support and sanctions for social assistance recipients. We want to present respondents of the LISS panel with a series of choice situations consisting of two social assistance schemes, which will differ in a number of respects, and ask them which scheme they would advise the government to choose in each of these situations. This will enable us to measure citizens’ willingness to allocate public budget to different purposes, so that we can formulate policy recommendations based on a combination of cost-benefit analysis and societal values.