Conference Agenda

This study investigates whether women place more or less importance on their social image of being socially responsible than men in a controlled lab-in-the-field experiment conducted in rural India. Participants in the experiment perform a simple task to generate a monetary endowment, donate a contribution from this earned endowment in private to an environmental NGO, and finally elicit their preferences for public recognition of their contributions through an incentive-compatible mechanism. The baseline treatment is that participants are not able to choose the amount to donate but are obliged to contribute the entire monetary endowment earned to the NGO. They are also asked to state their WTP for public recognition. The findings indicate that, compared to men, women are more generous and are also willing to pay more to remain anonymous. However, we do not find any difference in WTP for public recognition between men and women. The mix of similarity and diversity in women's voluntary contributions to public goods and their concerns for social image shows that understanding women's behaviour is crucial for designing cost-effective norm-based policies.

While people often avoid learning about negative social consequences of their actions in order to behave selfishly, many social situations involve another person who is in a position to impose this information. How does the presence of a potential informer affect information, behavior, and welfare in social decisions with moral wiggle-room? We introduce a third-party informer into the moral wiggle-room game. Almost half of the dictators tried to avoid information only to have it imposed upon them by the informer. These unwillingly-informed dictators frequently revised their behavior to benefit the recipient, even at their own expense. Given an opportunity to reward informers, most dictators chose to do so, but those who had bad news thrust upon them by the informer were more likely to withhold the reward. Interestingly, a subtle change in the choice interface—separating the dictator’s ignorance and allocation choices in two separate screens—caused a substantial reduction in the share of dictators choosing ignorance.

Using a survey of a large representative sample of the German population, we study the reputational impact of a range of different pro-environmental behaviors. The results show that most environmentally friendly measures are associated with a positive effect on the person's reputation, some measures are considered neutral, and only a few are associated with a negative effect on reputation. Measures that are costly or difficult to implement are associated with a lower and not a higher reputational gain than easy measures which contradicts the assumption that more effort and commitment lead to more recognition. Measures that can be characterized as social engagement, such as voting for certain parties, participating in demonstrations, joining NGOs, or boycotting companies, are rarely associated with a reputational gain. Measures that are associated with a reputational gain are more likely to be implemented, especially if they are easy to implement and visible to others. Overall, the best indicator of the likelihood of implementing a measure is how easy or difficult it is to implement.

We explore the interplay between two key drivers of green consumption: individual concerns about the environment, and about their image (i.e., how their choices are perceived by others and themselves). We build a microeconomic model analyzing the choices between lifestyles differing in cleanliness (brown/green) and conspicuousness (ostentatious/discrete). We assume one may consume green goods both for environmental and/or image motives, the main objective of the two differing between consumers, as captured by heterogeneous preference parameters. We highlight the role of image concerns as a substitute for environmental concerns in a range of preferences. Socioeconomic factors (such as lower green prices) and - to a much greater extent - cultural conditions (i.e., the distribution of preferences in the population) may allow for cleaner choices. In particular, taxes can spur lifestyle changes, albeit in a small range of preferences. Although conspicuous conservation can green individual baskets (reconciling Eco and Ego), it does not always yield environmental benefits at the collective level. We finally show the need to adapt policy tools to the preferences of the targeted group of consumers (e.g., complementing Pigovian taxes with nudges and income redistribution). While carbon taxes are efficient for those who do not care about the environment, redistribution from the wealthiest to the poorest may be more relevant beyond a minimum threshold of environmental concern.