Working Paper

This paper experimentally adapts a Public Good Game (PGG) to the environ-mental issue of waste management. Beside the traditional PGG, we implement a measurment of social preferences of the participants through a Social Value Orientation (SVO) test for an extended interpretation, by categorizing the individual’s preferences (altruistic, prosocial, individualistic and competitor) in a matter of resources allocation (Van Lange et al., 2007). Furthermore, the individual decision is analyzed by the impact of non-monetary (advice) vs. monetary incentives (sanction in the form of a tax, Andreoni (1993) within a group. Results show that if the advice increases the average level of individual contributions, the threat of sanction is more efficient to enhance cooperation. Moreover, we find, in contrast with Croson (2006) and her altruism hypothesis that low income individuals contribute in absolute value as much as the higher income ones


This article aims to understand the determinants of household sorting behavior, using data from an original survey of 1,071 people.  In our study, we compare personal factors and political instruments in two French regions with different waste management policies. We assume that the determinants differ for individuals living in municipalities with strong waste management policies compared to those with weak waste management policies. Therefore, we compare two French regions with very low (PACA region) and very high (GE region) recycling rate. The results show that the overall determinants of recycling behavior are comparable in both regions but with several differences. Policy instruments have a significant impact only in the PACA region. Perceived policy effectiveness matters as the lack of means of the policy variables has a negative and significant effect on residents in the PACA region but does not affect GE region residents. Environmental beliefs and norms play a role in both regions, though only Awareness of Consequences and Ascription of Responsibility have a significant effect in the GE region.


The central issue of this paper is to understand how policy makers can design instruments to create incentives towards green mobility. With this in mind, we ran a field experiment in 89 French firms (both public and private organizations) over 54 weeks to investigate how nudges and financial incentives can decrease the use of polluting vehicles by employees during their commute to work each week. Based on data including 845 employees, our study highlights several results related to three important attributes of policy design: the type of instrument, the timing and the targeting. We find that individuals exposed to the nudges “Moral Appeal”, “Risk of Loss”, and a combination of these two, significantly decrease their use of polluting vehicles in their daily commute to work. We find no treatment effect, either for the other nudges or for the impact of financial incentives. Our findings also reveal a persistent effect in time of the three successful nudges on the transport behavior of employees. Using a causal forest method to evaluate the heterogeneous treatment effects of these three nudges, we demonstrate that distance from work and pro-environmental behavior are the strongest predictors of treatment effects. We find that the further the employees reside from their workplace, the lower the treatment effect estimates. It suggests that selective targeting can improve the efficiency of the nudging policy.