Moral Suasion and the Private Provision of Public Goods: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

We study how moral suasion that appeals to two major ethical theories, Consequentialism and Deontology, affects individual intentions to contribute to a public good. We use the COVID-19 pandemic as an exemplary case where there is a large gap between private and social costs and where moral suasion has been widely used as a policy instrument. Based on a survey experiment with a representative sample of around 3500 Germans at the beginning of the pandemic, we study how moral appeals affect contributions with low and high opportunity costs, hand washing and social distancing, to reduce the infection externality as well as the support for governmental regulation. We find that Deontological moral suasion, appealing to individual moral duty, is effective in increasing planned social distancing and hand-washing, while a Consequentialist appeal only increases planned hand-washing. Both appeals increase support for governmental regulation. Exploring heterogeneous treatment effects reveals that younger respondents are more susceptible to Deontological appeals. Our results highlight the potential of moral appeals to induce intended private contributions to a public good or the reduction of externalities, which can help to overcome collective action problems for a range of environmental issues.

Moral Suasion and Economic Incentives: Field Experimental Evidence from Energy Demand

“…Our study addresses this problem by randomly assigning consumers to either moral suasion or economic incentives in a field experiment. 3 Finally, our results provide important implications for economic policy. Moral suasion has become increasingly common when policymakers aim to promote pro-social behavior.…”

“…Finally, we conducted the third survey for a random sample of 717 households in the area to investigate the external validity of our experimental sample. Columns 1,2,and 3 of Table 1 present the summary statistics of demographic variables and preexperiment consumption data by treatment group. A comparison across control and treatment groups indicates statistical balance in observables because of random assignment of the groups.…”

“…andMcRae and Meeks (2016) find that information provision changes electricity consumers' responses to marginal prices. However, Chetty and Saez (2013) find that providing information about nonlinear tax incentives does not systematically affect earnings on average, although these authors also find evidence of heterogeneous treatment effects among taxpayers 3. Other examples of nonexperimental studies documenting intrinsically motivated conservation includeCutter and Neidell (2009), who study the "Spare the Air" program in California andFerraro and Price (2013), who investigate water conservation.…”

The Invisible Hand of the Government: Moral Suasion during the European Sovereign Debt Crisis

“…Finally, they are also more likely to feel a moral obligation or patriotic duty toward their government. 4 Our identification strategy thus relies on assessing the differences in net purchases of domestic sovereign debt between "high-need" and "low-need" months during a period of fiscal stress for domestic banks (the treatment group) relative to foreign banks (the control group). We define a high-need month to be a month in which the total amount of maturing debt is above the country-specific median for the applicable sample period.…”

“…For example, during the height of the crisis, €62.7 billion worth of Italian debt matured in September 2011, but only €15.7 billion in October 2011 3. Data on maturing debt come from the Eurosystem Securities Database 4. We later differentiate, within the group of domestic banks, between banks that are under the influence of the government and those that are not, as well as between weak and strong banks, in order to examine which type of banks are more likely to be morally swayed by their government.…”