Jakob, Michael
[VerfasserIn];
Kübler, Dorothea
[VerfasserIn];
Steckel, Jan Christoph
[VerfasserIn];
Veldhuizen, Roel van
[VerfasserIn]
;
Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung gGmbH
Clean up your own mess: an experimental study of moral responsibility and efficiency
Erschienen in:Discussion Papers / Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, Forschungsschwerpunkt Markt und Entscheidung, Abteilung Verhalten auf Märkten ; Bd. SP II 2016-215
Beschreibung:
Although market-based environmental policy instruments feature prominently in economic theory and are widely employed, they often meet with public resistance. We argue that such resistance may be driven by a feeling of moral responsibility where citizens prefer to tackle environmental problems themselves, rather than delegating the task to others by means of a market mechanism. Using a laboratory experiment that isolates moral responsibility from alternative explanations, we show that moral responsibility induces participants to incur a sizable cost on themselves as well as on other participants. We discuss the implications of this finding for the design and implementation of environmental policies.