Research

This paper uses the randomized roll-out of a national agricultural extension program in Uganda to study subsistence smallholders' decisions to adopt cash oilseed crops and shift to commercial farming. By eliciting farmers' ex-ante yield and price expectations, we examine how these beliefs evolve in response to the intervention and their role on farmers' adoption choice. We find that information provision through extension services makes farmers significantly revise expectations up and increases oilseeds adoption by 15% on average. Results suggest that changing farmers' beliefs is a major intermediate driver in the decision process of agricultural technology take-up, thereby justifying information-centered interventions aimed at correcting systematic mis-perceptions about crop profitability.

Policymakers and firms use behavioral interventions to promote sustainable development in various domains. Correctly evaluating the impacts of a nudge on behavior and satisfaction requires looking beyond the targeted domain and assessing its interactions with other similar interventions. Existing evidence on these aspects is limited, leading to potential misestimation of the cost-effectiveness of this type of intervention and poor guidance on how to design them best. Through a large-scale randomized controlled trial implemented with a multi-resource utility company, we test the impact of a social information campaign to nudge water conservation over two years. We find that the water nudge significantly decreases water and electricity usage, but not gas. The effect is driven by customers who do not receive nudges targeting the other resources. Customers receiving the water report are also significantly less likely to deactivate their gas and electricity contracts, regardless of whether they receive other reports. Our results suggest that multiple nudges strain users' limited attention and ability to enact conservation efforts. Users' constraints in attending to multiple stimuli pose important challenges for designing policy interventions to foster sustainable practices. 

Decisions with significant and long-lasting consequences can be influenced by conditions at the moment of choice, such as weather. Using administrative data from an online retailer, we examine whether temperature and other weather variables affect the search and purchase of energy-using durables, namely, air conditioners (ACs) and dryers. We observe more sales of ACs on hot days and fewer sales of dryers on hot, windy days. We find no impact for appliances whose usefulness is not affected by the weather. For AC, weather-induced searches and purchases are in lower-efficiency energy classes. Product search data allow us to look into the process leading up to purchase. Prospective AC buyers search less intensively when the temperature is higher, and the opposite holds for buyers of dryers when temperature and wind speed increase. Models of memory and attention can explain these behavioral patterns. Understanding these dynamics is important for designing energy-efficiency policies, given the energy needs of cooling technologies and their increased demand and usefulness in a rapidly warming world.

Recent years have seen an increase in the frequency and severity of climate change-related natural disasters and the rise of a global movement against climate change. Peaks in the prominence of climate change issues on media and social media accompany these natural and socio-political events. Existing evidence on how climate change salience impacts real-world environmental behavior is scarce. In this paper, we employ electricity-use data, covering 1.5 M Italian households over the period 2015-2019, and a granular measure of social media attention to climate change, derived from universal-coverage Twitter data, to show that increases in climate change salience induced by exogenous sociopolitical and climatic events cause a significant reduction in energy consumption. This effect is short-lived, as is typical of salience-induced behavioral changes. Sentiment analysis suggests that natural disasters and climate strikes are associated with emotions that are strong motivators for action, such as anger and positive feelings of solidarity. These results suggest that episodes that heighten attention to climate change may lead to actual behavioral change, but that their effect is only short-lived. 

We study the introduction of a social information program on waste disposal in the presence of varying economic incentives. Our setting is characterized by a hybrid pay-as-you throw system for unsorted waste: households pay a fixed amount as long as their yearly disposal is below a pre-defined cap, then pay per disposal after exceeding the cap. We randomise the receipt of a report informing customers of how much unsorted waste they produced, relative to similar neighbours. An additional treatment couples the social comparison with information on the customer's disposal cap. The report containing the social norm leads to a 7% reduction in the volume of unsorted waste compared to the control group. Making the cap salient reduces the effectiveness of the social norm in curbing the volume of unsorted waste. Both interventions have the same effect on the likelihood of exceeding the disposal cap. The reduction in unsorted waste is partly achieved through an increase in recycling, and is not accompanied by any increase in illegal disposals or a decrease in the quality of sorted waste.  Our results confirm the effectiveness of descriptive norms in coordinating behavior in a novel decision environment, and indicate that their effectiveness as focal points is undermined by the provision of alternative reference points.