This article discusses the use of green nudges—behavioral interventions aimed at reducing negative externalities—as an environmental policy instrument. We present a new framework for classifying ...nudges according to how they affect behavior. Pure nudges change the choice environment to guide behavior unobtrusively. Moral nudges trigger a psychological reaction to encourage behavior change. Our review of empirical studies reveals that green nudges, pure or moral, can have a significant impact on behavior and the environment but that the effects are highly context dependent. On the basis of both our review and basic welfare economics models, we discuss key factors for policy makers to consider when choosing between implementing a green nudge and implementing conventional policy instruments.
This paper investigates direct and spillover effects of a social information campaign aimed at encouraging residential water savings in Colombia. The campaign was organized as a randomized field ...experiment, consisting of monthly delivery of consumption reports, including normative messages, for one year. Results indicate that social information and appeals to norm-based behavior reduce water use by up to 6.8% in households directly targeted by the campaign. In addition, we find evidence of spillover effects: households that were not targeted by the campaign reduced water use by 5.8% in the first six months following the intervention.
In this paper, we present evidence from a lab-in-the-field experiment of the effects of the Chinese one-child policy on adults in China who were born just before and after the introduction of the ...policy. We measure risk, uncertainty, and time preferences, as well as subjects’ preferences in the social domain, i.e., concerning competitiveness, cooperation, and bargaining. We sampled people from three Chinese provinces born both before and after the introduction of the policy in 1979. We utilize the fact that the one-child policy was introduced at different times and with different degrees of strictness in different provinces. Overall, we find a statistically significant effect only on risk and uncertainty aversion and not on any other preferences in the experiments: Those born after the introduction of the one-child policy are less risk and uncertainty averse. These results hold for various robustness checks and heterogeneity tests. Hence, our results do not confirm the general wisdom and stereotype of only-children in China being “little emperors.”
Demand effects in stated preference surveys Carlsson, Fredrik; Kataria, Mitesh; Lampi, Elina
Journal of environmental economics and management,
07/2018, Letnik:
90
Journal Article
Recenzirano
We argue that demand effects in stated preference studies are understudied. By demand effects, we mean anything in the survey that unintentionally influences respondents' beliefs about appropriate ...behavior, which in turn might affect their responses in the survey. We implement two methods for measuring and implicitly reducing the influence of demand effects. The first approach—random selection of good to be valued—does not have any effect on respondent behavior. The second approach—a demand script and a control question with feedback—has a sizable and statistically significant effect on respondent behavior. In particular, estimated marginal willingness to pay for improvements in water quality are substantially (around 50 percent) lower than a control treatment; we attribute this decrease to a reduced demand effect. Our results suggest that stated preference methods tend to lead to biased willingness-to-pay estimates due to demand effects, but that the bias can be reduced using simple measures.
•SP surveys are suggested to influences respondents' beliefs about appropriate behavior.•Beliefs can in turn affect responses in the survey.•This is tested using an experiment with control and treatment groups.•We show that the marginal WTP is substantially affected by such beliefs.
We investigate the role of anonymity, reciprocity, and conformity for voluntary contributions, based on a natural field experiment conducted at a national park in Costa Rica. Contributions made in ...public in front of the solicitor are 25% higher than contributions made in private. Giving subjects a small gift before requesting a contribution increases the likelihood of a positive contribution. At the same time, the conditional contribution decreases. The total effect of giving a gift is positive but small, and taking the cost of the gift into account, it is far from profitable. When the subjects are told that the typical contribution of others is $2 (a small contribution), the probability of a contribution increases and the conditional contribution decreases, compared with providing no reference information. Providing a high reference level ($10) increases the conditional contributions. Overall, the total effects have the expected signs, although the magnitudes are smaller than what one might have expected based on existing evidence from laboratory experiments.
Although
in-situ conservation is increasingly considered an efficient way of conserving plant genetic resources, little is known about the incentives and constraints that govern conservation ...decisions among small farm holders in developing countries. Using a choice experiment approach, we investigated Ethiopian farmers' crop variety preferences, estimated the mean willingness to pay for each crop variety attribute, and identified household-specific and institutional factors that governed the preferences. We found that environmental adaptability and yield stability are important attributes for farmers' choice of crop varieties. Farmers are willing to forego some extra income or yield to obtain a more stable and environmentally adaptable crop variety. Among other things, household resource endowments (particularly land holdings and livestock ownership), years of farming experience, and contact with extension services are the major factors causing household heterogeneity of crop variety preferences. Based on our experimental results, we derived important policy implications for on-farm conservation, breeding priority setting, and improved variety adoption in Ethiopia.
This paper discusses the current critique against neural network-based Natural Language Understanding solutions known as
language models
. We argue that much of the current debate revolves around an ...argumentation error that we refer to as
the singleton fallacy
: the assumption that a concept (in this case, language, meaning, and understanding) refers to a single and uniform phenomenon, which in the current debate is assumed to be unobtainable by (current) language models. By contrast, we argue that positing some form of (mental) “unobtanium” as definiens for understanding inevitably leads to a dualistic position, and that such a position is precisely the original motivation for developing distributional methods in computational linguistics. As such, we argue that language models present a theoretically (and practically) sound approach that is our current best bet for computers to achieve language understanding. This understanding must however be understood as a computational means to an end.
Municipalities’ cooperation is critical for successful policy interventions for disaster recovery. Using a spatial econometric model, we investigate what factors affected municipalities’ decision to ...accept disaster waste following the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011. We find evidence that economic factors affect the decision, but that concerns about the radiation risk and social preferences regarding the affected area also contribute to municipalities’ willingness to accept waste. Our results suggest that social concerns play an important role in understanding municipalities’ behavior in emergency circumstances.
•Both spouses have a significant influence on joint decisions.•There is a substantial share of choice shifts from individual to joint decisions.•There is no clear pattern that joint household choices ...tend to generate beneficial shifts.•A number of observable characteristics are significantly correlated with the likelihoods of choice shifts.
In this paper, we examine the relative influence of individual decisions on joint household decisions, and whether and to what extent joint choices are more or less patient than individual choices in households. We find that both spouses have a significant influence on joint decisions, whereas husbands on average have a stronger influence than wives. Moreover, we find a substantial share of choice shifts from individual to joint household decisions, i.e. joint decisions are either more patient or more impatient than both individual choices. A number of observable characteristics are significantly correlated with these shifts in preferences from individual decisions to joint decisions.
Although conventional economic theory proposes that only the absolute levels of income and consumption matter for people's utility, there is much evidence that relative concerns are often important. ...This paper uses a choice experiment to measure people's perceptions of the degree to which such concerns matter, i.e. the degree of positionality. Based on a random sample in Sweden, income and cars are found to be highly positional, on average, in contrast to leisure and car safety. Leisure may even be completely nonpositional. Potential policy implications are discussed.
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