The Power of Active Choice: Field Experimental Evidence on Repeated Contribution Decisions to a Carbon Offsetting Program

Kesternich, Martin; Roemer, Daniel Beck; Flues, Florens

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2896741

Cited by 8 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Results from field studies suggest that if supporting a VCA is a pre-set default option, this also increases average contributions of experts in the field of environmental economics (Löfgren et al 2012). This effect is stable over longer time periods (Kesternich et al 2019). Stimuli like matching and rebate subsidies also have positive effects on increasing a VCA (Kesternich et al 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 82%

Climate Action for (My) Children

Fornwagner

Hauser

2020

SSRN Journal

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Sustaining large-scale public goods, such as the environment, requires individuals to take action; however, motivating voluntary climate action (VCA) is difficult because decision-makers today do not stand to benefit from their investments.Here, we propose that parents invest more in VCA if their link to future generations-through their offspring-is made salient. In a novel lab-in-the-field experiment, we vary whether parents are observed during a VCA decision (i.e., investing in planting real-world trees) by their own child. In addition to a no-observer control, we run additional control conditions with an unrelated adult or an unrelated child observing the parent decision-maker. As predicted, VCA varies across conditions, with larger treatment effects occurring when a parent's own child is the observer. In subgroup analyses, larger treatment effects occur among more educated parents. As a result of this study, VCA across conditions led to 14,000 trees being planted, offsetting approximately 8% of participants' annual CO2 emissions for around four generations.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 82%

Climate Action for (My) Children

Fornwagner

Hauser

2020

SSRN Journal

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“…Results from field studies suggest that if supporting a VCA is a pre-set default option, this also increases the average contributions of experts in the field of environmental economics (Löfgren et al 2012 ). This effect is stable over longer time periods (Kesternich et al 2019 ). Stimuli like matching and rebate subsidies also have positive effects on increasing a VCA (Kesternich et al 2016 ).…”

Section: Appendix A: Additional Analyses By Study Locationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate Action for (My) Children

Fornwagner

Hauser

2021

Environ Resource Econ

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How do we motivate cooperation across the generations—between parents and children? Here we study voluntary climate action (VCA), which is costly to today’s decision-makers but essential to enable sustainable living for future generations. We predict that “offspring observability” is critical: parents will be more likely to invest in VCA when their own offspring observes their action, whereas when adults or genetically unrelated children observe them, the effect will be smaller. In a large-scale lab-in-the-field experiment, we observe a remarkable magnitude of VCA: parents invest 82% of their 69€ endowment into VCA, resulting in almost 14,000 real trees being planted. Parents’ VCA varies across conditions, with the largest treatment effect occurring when a parent’s own child is the observer. In subgroup analyses, we find that larger treatment effects occur among parents with a high school diploma. Moreover, VCA for parents who believe in climate change is most affected by the presence of their own child. In contrast, VCA of climate change skeptical parents is most influenced by the presence of children to whom they are not related. Our findings have implications for policy-makers interested in designing programs to encourage voluntary climate action and sustaining intergenerational public goods.

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“…While costly search is one important channel that might lead to financially suboptimal decision-making, the contextual features of the choice setting might also play a critical role (Altmann et al, 2019). Different policies aim to shape our choices either by setting default options or by enforcing active decision-making (Beshears et al, 2019;Kesternich et al, 2019;Stutzer et al, 2011). For example, we, as consumers, are automatically allocated to specific default tariffs or contracts and in some settings are asked to take an active decision or give our consent.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Default vs. Active Choices: An Experiment on Electricity Tariff Switching

Atasoy

Madlener

2020

SSRN Journal

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In distinct decision environments, consumers often fail to financially optimize their decisions. In liberalized electricity markets, consumers frequently do not optimize their electricity choices and stick with the default providers instead, despite the ability to choose among an increasingly large set of electricity suppliers and benefit from lower cost options. In this paper, we study the effect of different contextual features of the choice environment (i.e., default and active choice enforcement) and search costs (i.e., high and low) on the quality of electricity contract choices, with the help of a randomized controlled laboratory experiment. We provide evidence that the default contract rule lowers the decision quality compared to the active decision rule in both search cost environments. Default rules lower the quality of contract choices especially for the individuals with lower cognitive ability. Contrary to the expectations, we observe that the number of alternatives has no effect on the quality of electricity contract choices. Our findings have important implications for regulatory rule setting in the electricity market.

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The Power of Active Choice: Field Experimental Evidence on Repeated Contribution Decisions to a Carbon Offsetting Program

Cited by 8 publications

References 25 publications

Climate Action for (My) Children

Climate Action for (My) Children

Climate Action for (My) Children

Default vs. Active Choices: An Experiment on Electricity Tariff Switching

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