Behavioral Insights from Field Experiments in Environmental Economics

Abstract

Many environmental decisions are based on intrinsic motivations in addition to traditional economic incentives. Field experiments allow researchers to isolate a specific causal mechanism which can help advance our understanding of consumer and firm behavior in environmental markets. This article summarizes the literature on the use of field experiments in environmental economics, focusing on framed and artefactual field experiments as well as natural experiments targeting municipal energy and water demand. We set out a theoretical framework to improve the interpretation of results from field experiments in environmental economics. In addition to providing an overview of experimental methods and findings we also lay out a set of challenges for researchers interested in running a field experiment in environmental economics.

Taxation, redistribution, and observability in social dilemmas

“…Second, our paper is related to the literature on the impact of heterogeneity in social dilemmas. When individuals are heterogeneous in a public good game, a tradeoff between efficiency, proportionality, and equality may appear (Gangadharan et al, ; Nikiforakis et al, ; Reuben & Riedl ) . Most of the proposed mechanisms provide incentives to maximize efficiency.…”

“…Each group consists of two players with a higher extraction capacity and two players with a lower capacity. An extraction capacity is assigned to the subjects based on their relative performance in a preliminary encryption task similar to that used in Erkal, Gangadharan, and Nikiforakis (), Charness, Masclet, and Villeval (), and Gangadharan et al (). Subjects are given a table assigning a number to each letter of the alphabet and are asked to encode sets of letters into numbers in 10 min.…”

Long-Term Effects of Payments for Environmental Services: Combining Insights from Communication and Economics

“…The motivation crowding literature suggests that financial incentives interact with social norms in unexpected ways e.g., [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. However, to date this literature lacks a sufficiently sophisticated articulation of social norms to sufficiently analyze the roles of social norms in motivation crowding out and, potentially, to take advantage of social norms to overcome crowding out and perhaps even help promote crowding in.…”

“…The basic idea of motivation crowding is that humans are driven by multiple sources of motivation (e.g., intrinsic and extrinsic), and that extrinsic motivation, such as financial incentives, can interact with intrinsic motivation, such as social and personal motivators [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. Incentives that undermine intrinsic sources of motivation can crowd-out the targeted behavior, while incentives that reinforce intrinsic sources of motivation can crowd it in.…”

Minimum Levels and Framing in Public Good Provision

“…8 Moreover, societies across the world differ substantially in terms of social organization, trust, fairness norms, and also in the nature of day-to-day cooperation problems. 9 Results from developing-country nonstudent subject pools such as ours could therefore be particularly important both in examining the generalizability of experimental findings and in drawing policy conclusions about social dilemmas prevalent in such places (e.g., Brent et al 2016). The rest of the paper is organized as follows.…”