Conference Agenda

High environmental taxes face global opposition despite their broad recognition as essential for environmental protection. This study employs the random forest algorithm and the ISSP Environment surveys from 2020 (N=43,678) and 2010 (N=27,032) across 28 countries to identify factors associated with opposition to environmental tax increases. Simultaneously analyzing 41 individual-level factors and tax system characteristics, we find individual values and environmental evaluations generally outweigh demographic factors for predicting tax opposition. The importance of factors varies over regions and time. In high-income countries, concerns about environmental issues and prioritizing jobs and prices emerge as influential, gaining prominence over the previous decade. Conversely, an individual's lack of commitment to pro-environmental behavior is the most important predictor in emerging economies. Our results highlight the dynamic nature of environmental attitudes. Policymakers and advocates can leverage these insights to tailor and target the communication of environmental tax increases in different contexts, for instance, by emphasizing job creation.

We show that French farmers hold inaccurate beliefs about their peers on eco-schemes (ES), a new policy instrument under discussion in the 2023-27 reform of the EU Common Agricultural Policy. We first elicit farmers' beliefs about their peers regarding the ES and, then, expose them to truthful information focusing on perceived environmental benefits, adoption rates or the monetary compensation asked to implement the ES. We demonstrate that these informational treatments may modify (i) farmers' own opinion regarding the ES; and (ii) farmers' beliefs about peers regarding the ES. Although the changes in beliefs are shown to be consistent with Bayesian-updating, we demonstrate that their causal effects may strongly depend upon the nature of the belief considered.

Meeting climate goals requires radical changes in the consumption behaviour of individuals. This necessitates an understanding of how the diffusion of low-carbon behaviour will occur. The speed and inter-dependency of these changes in behavioural choices may be modulated by individuals’ culture. We develop an agent-based model to study how behavioural decarbonisation interacts with longer-term cultural change, composed of individuals with multiple behaviours that evolve due to imperfect social learning in a social network. Using the definition of culture as socially transmitted information, we represent individuals' environmental identity as an aggregation of attitudes towards multiple relevant behaviours. The strength of interaction between individuals is determined by the similarity in their environmental identity, leading to inter-behavioural dependency and spillovers in green attitudes. Our results show that the initial distribution of agent attitudes towards behaviours and asymmetries in social learning, such as confirmation bias, are the main drivers of model dynamics, helping to generate awareness of what roadblocks may appear to deep decarbonisation. To assess the impact of culture beyond a purely diffusive regime, we introduce green influencers as a minority of individuals who broadcast a green attitude. The greatest emissions reduction is achieved with the inclusion of culture, relative to a behavioural independence case, and with low confirmation bias. However, green influencers fail to achieve deep behavioural decarbonisation through solely voluntary action. We identify areas for further research regarding how culture, through inter-behavioural dependence, may be leveraged for climate policy.

We present a theoretical framework for modeling opportunistic and cooperative behavior within the context of a social dilemma problem. It presents a generalization of the concept of homo moralis. It is formulated as a game on a social network and takes account of the interaction of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and heterogeneity of the agents for explaining cooperation and social pressure by peers. The numerical solution of the game yields the agents’ expected behavior as a set (tipping line) of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation where agents are indifferent between opportunistic and cooperative behavior. The analysis shows that the number of indecisive agents decreases, and the number of defectors increases during the game while the number compliers is hardly unaffected by the game. In contrast with the concept of homo moralis we find that agents even with a low intrinsic motivation may act cooperatively if their extrinsic motivation is sufficiently low, or may act non-cooperatively even with a high intrinsic motivation if their extrinsic motivation is sufficiently high. The interplay of intrinsic and extrinsic explains why the strength of intrinsic motivation is not sufficient for the determination of the agent’s behavior. It explains why agents with a high intrinsic motivation may seem to act incoherently if they decide to act non-cooperatively. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are imperfect complements with an increasing rate of substitution as the value of intrinsic motivation rises.