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Abstract:To examine which considerations play a role when individuals make decisions to purchase sustainable product varieties or not, we have conducted a large scale field experiment with more than 600 participating households. Households can vote on whether the budgets they receive should only be spent on purchasing the sustainable product variety, or whether every household in a group is free to spend their budget on any product variety. By conducting several treatments, we tested whether people tend to view sustainable consumption as a social dilemma or as a moral dilemma. We find little support for the hypothesis that social dilemma considerations are the key drivers of sustainable consumption behaviour. Participants seem to be caught in a moral dilemma in which they not only weigh their individual financial costs with the sustainable benefits but they also consider the consequences of restricting other people's freedom of choice. Complementary survey results further substantiate this claim and show that many people are reluctant to impose restrictions on their peers, but, at the same time, our results also suggest substantial support for the government to regulate the availability of unsustainable product varieties.

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Rapid increases in livestock production in the Netherlands have changed manure from a valuable input into a mere waste product. This is especially true for the southern and eastern parts of the country, where specialized pig and poultry farms have concentrated on sandy soils. As these farms generally own very little land, they largely depend on imported feedstuffs. As a consequence, manure is applied to the land in such large quantities that serious environmental problems have resulted: (1) eutrophication of surface water by phosphate emissions; (2) pollution of groundwater by nitrate emissions; and (3) acidification by ammonia emissions. In the last few years the Dutch government has developed a manure policy to counteract these effects. Our analysis of that policy has revealed at least three fundamental defects, which render the manure policy ineffective and inefficient. In this paper proposals are made to remove the defects in current manure policy. Much attention is paid to the problem of designing a mixture of policy instruments which is both effective as well as efficient in limiting the environmental problems caused by manure. It is shown that the use of financial incentives in regulation can substantially improve the efficiency of the manure policy. Finally, the main economic consequences of the proposed policy are examined for the public sector as well as for the agricultural sector. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 1991Manure problem, nutrient policy, nutrient surplus, regulatory levy, sustainability, agriculture, intensive livestock sector, acidification, groundwater pollution, eutrophication,