Seminar
Past
Understanding Markets with Socially Responsible Consumers
Botond Koszegi
- Date5 March 2024
- Time 16h00 - 17h15
- Room Auditorium 3 (Ground floor - TSE Building)
Abstract
Many consumers care about climate change and other externalities associated with their purchases. We analyze the behavior and market effects of such “socially responsible consumers” in three parts. First, we develop a flexible theoretical framework to study competitive equilibria with rational consequentialist consumers. In violation of price taking, equilibrium feedback non-trivially dampens a consumer’s mitigation efforts, undermining responsible behavior. This leads to a new type of market failure, where even consumers who fully “internalize the externality” overconsume externality-generating goods. At the same time, socially responsible consumers change the relative effectiveness of taxes, caps, and other policies in lowering the externality. Second, since consumer beliefs about and preferences over dampening play a crucial role in our framework, we investigate them empirically via a tailored survey. Consistent with our model, consumers are predominantly consequentialist, and on average believe in dampening. Inconsistent with our model, however, many consumers fail to anticipate dampening. Third, therefore, we analyze how such “naive” consumers modify our theoretical conclusions. Naive consumers behave more responsibly than rational consumers in a single-good economy, but may behave less responsibly in a multi-good economy with cross-market spillovers. A mix of naive and rational consumers may yield the worst outcomes.
Other seminars
Past
Dissecting political polarization: from attitudes to affect
-
Seminar
-
Social and Behavioral Sciences Seminar
-
Date 21 May 2024
-
Place Auditorium 3
-
Speaker or organiser Marijn Keijzer
Details
Past
Conducting Qualitative Interviews with AI
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Seminar
-
Social and Behavioral Sciences Seminar
-
Date 19 March 2024
-
Place Auditorium 3 (Ground floor - TSE Building)
-
Speaker or organiser Ingar Haaland
Details
Past
Building Criminal Networks in Prison - Evidence from French cellmates
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Seminar
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Social and Behavioral Sciences Seminar
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Date 14 March 2024
-
Place Auditorium 4
-
Speaker or organiser Arnaud Philippe
Details