Séminaire

Pro-environmental behavior, positive self-signaling, and the design of informational interventions: Experimental evidence

Bruno Lanz (University of Neuchâtel)

1 octobre 2018, 11h00–12h15

Toulouse

Salle MS 003

Environment Economics Seminar

Résumé

Informational interventions to incentivize pro-environmental behavior (e.g. internalize externalities) are becoming increasingly popular and widespread. In this work, we study a novel sort of intervention that attempts to leverage our tendency to follow the norms prescribed by our self-perceived identity. The objective of the intervention is to manipulate salience of past pro-environmental behavior, thereby affecting environmental self-identity, and in turn induce subsequent pro-environmental behavior. This approach can be rationalized with a self-signaling model in which agents learn about their identities (or moral types) through their own actions. In such a framework, external interventions that increase salience of past effortful behavior can act as a substitute to these self-signals, thereby inducing agents to subsequently perform pro-environmental actions. By contrast, salience of past effortless pro-environmental behavior is not informative for self-inference, and could even lead to a form of moral licensing reducing future pro-environmental behavior. We illustrate this mechanism and quantify its impact on behavior by reporting the results from three experiments.