Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
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Barking Up the Wrong Tree? Beliefs and Valuations in Voluntary Carbon Offsetting
Lara Bartels
Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Germany
Discussant: Begüm Özdemir Oluk (Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology)
Recent criticisms have cast doubts on the effectiveness of forest-based offsets for long-term climate change mitigation, yet demand remains high. Using a large-scale framed field experiment involving 1,012 incentivized offsetting choices from a general population sample, I show that the high demand for forest carbon offsets is driven by inaccurate prior beliefs leading to an overestimation of trees long-term climate impact, as well as accurately and highly valued beliefs on the co-benefits provided by forest offsets. Providing information about the offsets' true climate impact leads to a significant shift in contributions, with demand for forest offsets decreasing by 24% and demand for EU ETS offsets, initially an unpopular choice despite being more climate-impactful, increasing by 153%. The findings have implications for the design of effective information strategies to guide consumers towards preference-aligned choices for goods and services.
Transparency of Carbon-Neutral Labels: Evidence from a Choice Experiment
Begüm Özdemir Oluk1,2
1University of St.Gallen, Switzerland; 2Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, Switzerland
Discussant: Nora Svarstad Ytreberg (CICERO Center for International Climate Research)
This paper examines the effect of transparency in carbon-neutral labeling on consumer willingness to pay. Carbon-neutral labels indicate that a product’s greenhouse-gas emissions have been offset (compensated) outside the company and/or directly reduced within it. Although CO2 offsets are generally viewed as less effective than CO2 reductions, most labels on the market lack transparency regarding the proportion of CO2 offset and CO2 reduction. This study empirically investigates whether consumers are willing to pay for transparency on carbon-neutral labels and explores whether there are differences in consumers’ valuation of CO2 reductions versus CO2 offsets. Using a discrete‐choice-experiment survey among UK tea consumers, I compare willingness to pay for standard versus transparent carbon-neutral labels. The control group saw a standard carbon-neutral label, while the treatment groups saw transparent labels indicating different shares of CO2 offsetting and CO2 reduction. I find no evidence of consumers’ willingness to pay for transparency on carbon-neutral labels or preference for CO2 reductions over CO2 offsets.
Love thy neighbor - reducing driving through green slot labels in e-commerce
Nora Svarstad Ytreberg1, Guri Natalie Jordbakke2
1CICERO Center for International Climate Research, Norway; 2Institute of Transport Economics, Norwegian Center for Transport Research
Discussant: Andrei Kalk (University of Vienna)
Delivering products to consumers is a crucial aspect of e-commerce and a significant factor when discussing its sustainability. With the rapid growth of e-commerce and its related negative externalities, there is an emerging literature on the potential of nudging consumers towards more environmentally friendly delivery options. We contribute to this literature by exploring a quasi-natural experiment of green labeling, investigating revealed preference data from 35,828 Norwegian customers over almost five weeks in 2024. A green label was used on time slots to optimize the route planning, thereby minimizing driving and related externalities. We exploit the quasi-random property of the assignment mechanism of green labels to specific slots. We assess the impact of the green label on the probability of a customer choosing a greener alternative by estimating a multinomial logit model.
Results show that the probability of choosing a slot more than doubles when labeled as green. In addition, our results indicate a diminishing effect over exposure time. We find a willingness to pay € 1 for green delivery. Our findings show that green labeling is an effective tool for online retailers to minimize delivery costs.
Protecting the Environment: On the Interplay Between Voluntary Contributions and Public Policy
Andrei Kalk
University of Vienna, Austria
Discussant: Lara Bartels (Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods)
We study the interplay between individuals' voluntary contributions to environmental protection and public environmental policy in a dynamic general-equilibrium model. To capture the observed discrepancy between the willingness of individuals to pay for public versus private environmental protection, we treat the quality of the environment as a public good and assume that voluntary contributions are motivated by a 'warm glow' of giving. We show that in the laissez-faire scenario without government intervention, the strength of warm glow negatively affects aggregate output and positively affects environmental quality in the long run. However, when the government intervenes and decides on environmental policy in the interests of individuals, the warm-glow strength has a negative long-run effect on both variables. Thus, our results suggest that advocating for private actions to ensure a better environment in the future may be counterproductive in the presence of public environmental policies.
