Conference Agenda

We present an economic experiment where two groups interact in a linear repeated public goods game. In one treatment, groups give to a public good. In the other treatment, groups take from a public good. A large literature has documented that this difference in framing can lead to substantial differences in cooperation in pay-off equivalent social dilemmas. Here, we study the existence and persistence of such a give-take framing effect when groups, not individuals, decide. We find large differences in cooperation in the first supergame of the experiment, but no difference in cooperation in the second supergame. Analyzing the group's decision-making process and their chats, we find that the results can best be explained by groups strongly reciprocating (treatment specific) initial defection in the first supergame, and (irrespective of treatment) adopting a payoff-maximing treshold strategy of initial trust building and last-round defection in the second supergame.

Do people find it morally acceptable for a decision-maker to avoid information about the harmful consequences of their actions? We address this question in a large-scale

experiment in which participants, acting as impartial spectators, can intervene to ensure that a decision-maker makes an informed choice. Most spectators chose to inform, even when they know the information will not affect the decision-maker’s choice and the decision-maker prefers to remain uninformed. The willingness to inform is strongly linked to support for real-world policies addressing negative externalities and viewing informed choice as duty. These results suggest that many people treat information provision as a moral obligation, not merely as a means of changing behavior.

We explore the interplay between two key individual drivers of green consumption: intrinsic moral concerns for the environment and reputational concerns for social image. Our microeconomic behavioral model characterizes choices among lifestyles differing in environmental impacts (brown/green) and conspicuousness (positional/discreet), depending on how strongly one values each of these motives.

We show that image concerns can substitute for environmental concerns in driving green consumption across a limited but central range of preferences, in particular through the purchase of green positional goods.

Such conspicuous conservation can green individual consumption (\textit{reconciling Eco and Ego}), especially among image-sensitive consumers, but it yields environmental benefits only under specific economic conditions. Indeed, the environmental impact of a lifestyle depends critically on its \textit{relative impact intensity}, i.e., the pollution per dollar spent on this lifestyle, more than on the pollution per unit of the representative good of the lifestyle, driving volume effects and behavioral rebound effects, which both reduce the environmental benefits of green lifestyles. Knowing the collective distribution of preferences may help design targeted policies, as those preferences strongly determine policy effectiveness. Our findings are especially relevant for policies that aim to foster greener consumption choices in different economic contexts (e.g., green nudging, environmental taxes with higher rates on positional goods...).

Many environmental policies rely on information campaigns to promote voluntary participation in socially desirable activities. This paper studies the effectiveness of such campaigns in the context of pharmaceutical waste recycling in France, where returning unused medicines is voluntary and managed through a delegated eco-organization. We develop a simple theoretical framework in which individuals decide whether to recycle by comparing an individual-specific valuation of recycling with a perceived cost that includes time, effort, and informational frictions. Using repeated cross-sectional survey data, we exploit a standardized informational script delivered during interviews to all respondents who report not recycling medicines and examine subsequent stated intentions to change behavior. We find that the informational message is associated with higher intended recycling only among individuals with high valuation of recycling, while individuals with low valuation remain largely unresponsive. These findings highlight intrinsic limits of information-based policy instruments and help explain why uniform campaigns implemented through delegated governance structures often generate modest aggregate effects, underscoring the role of behavioral heterogeneity in environmental policy design.