Conference Agenda
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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Daily Overview |
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Egg-Timer: Energy Demand and Behavior Location: D-111 Session Chair: Pranay Kumar, University College Dublin | |
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Cash or Lottery? Experimental Evidence on Reducing Crop Residue Burning in Thailand 1: Kasetsart University, Thailand; 2: American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates; 3: World Bank, Thailand; 4: Chulalongkorn University, Thailand Postharvest crop residue burning (CRB) remains a major source of air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and public health damage across Asia, driven by economic constraints, weak enforcement, and collective action failures. This paper provides causal evidence on how alternative incentive designs influence farmers’ burning behavior, emphasizing the role of behavioral framing rather than incentive magnitude alone. We report results from a randomized field experiment with 299 rice farmers in three provinces of Thailand, comparing three incentive schemes conditional on verifiable non-burning behavior: a guaranteed individual cash payment, a lottery-based payment with an equivalent expected value, and an anonymous group-based compensation scheme. Compliance is measured using high-resolution satellite imagery combined with ground-truth field verification. We find that individually targeted incentives significantly reduce CRB, with strong heterogeneity across designs. Guaranteed payments reduce burning by approximately 7 percentage points, while lottery-based incentives reduce burning by 12–13 percentage points, despite having similar expected payouts. Regression estimates with village fixed effects show that lottery incentives reduce the probability of burning by nearly 60 percent relative to the control group. In contrast, anonymous group-based incentives have no detectable effect on burning behavior. These results are consistent with behavioral theories of nonlinear probability weighting and salience, suggesting that probabilistic rewards can improve behavioral responses without increasing fiscal costs. The effectiveness of lottery incentives is reinforced by their alignment with locally familiar and trusted institutions. This study makes a novel contribution as one of the first experimental evaluations of incentive-based policies to reduce crop residue burning in Southeast Asia. The findings offer practical guidance for designing cost-effective, scalable environmental policies that can draw on behavioral mechanisms to address persistent agricultural externalities. | |