Research
Publications
Fair Shares and Selective Attention (with Dianna Amasino and Joël van der Weele) - AEJ: Microeconomics, Forthcoming
Coverage: Twitter thread
Self-serving Bias in Redistribution Choices: Accounting for Beliefs and Norms (with Dianna Amasino and Joël van der Weele) - Journal of Economic Psychology, 2023, 98 (October): 102654
Coverage: Twitter thread
Working papers
How to Increase Public Support for Carbon Pricing (With Andrej Woerner, Taisuke Imai, and Klaus Schmidt )
Coverage: Citizens' Climate Lobby
The public acceptability of a carbon price depends on how the revenues from carbon pricing are used. In a fully incentivised experiment with a large representative sample of the German population, we compare five different revenue recycling schemes and show that support for a carbon price is maximised by a “Climate Premium” that pays a fixed, uniform, upfront payment to each person. This recycling scheme receives more support than tax and dividend schemes, than using revenues for the general budget of the government, and than earmarking revenues for environmental projects. Furthermore, we show that participants and experts underestimate the public support for carbon pricing.
Correcting Consumer Misperceptions about CO2 Emissions (with Taisuke Imai, Peter Schwardmann, and Joël van der Weele)
Coverage: Pour L'Eco, Rostra Economica, BSE Insights, Researching Misunderstandings, Twitter thread
Policy makers frequently champion information provisions about carbon impact on the premise that consumers are willing to mitigate their emissions but are poorly informed about how to do so. We empirically test this argument and reject it. We collect an extensive new dataset and find both large misperceptions of the carbon impact of different consumption behaviors and clear preferences for mitigation. Yet, in two separate experiments, we show that correcting beliefs has no effect on consumption in large representative samples. Our null results are well-powered and informative, as we target information for maximal impact. They call into question the potential of information policies to fight climate change.
Uncertainty about Carbon Impact and the Willingness to Avoid CO2 Emissions (with Taisuke Imai, Peter Schwardmann, and Joël van der Weele)
A previous version of this paper was circulated under the title: Curbing Carbon: An Experiment on Uncertainty and Information About CO2 Emissions
Coverage: Twitter thread of a previous version
With a large representative survey (N = 1128), we document that consumers are very uncertain about the emissions associated with various actions, which may affect their willingness to reduce their carbon footprint. We experimentally test two channels for the behavioural impact of such uncertainty, namely risk aversion about the impact of mitigating actions and the formation of motivated beliefs about this impact. In two large online experiments (N = 2219), participants make incentivized trade-offs between personal gain and (uncertain) carbon impact. We find no evidence that uncertainty affects individual climate change mitigation efforts through risk aversion or motivated belief channels. The results suggest that reducing consumer uncertainty through information campaigns is not a policy panacea and that communicating scientific uncertainty around climate impact need not backfire.
Memory Sophistication
Human memory is less than perfect, leading to mistakes in judgments and decisions. This project experimentally investigates a) whether people are sophisticated about their memory limitations, and b) whether the complexity of the memory task affects sophistication. It finds that people can be both under and overconfident about their memory and the complexity of the memory task increases the size of the mistakes. Interference makes people overconfident, instead a high amount of information to remember makes them underconfident. Confidence goes up with time mitigating underconfidence but exacerbating overconfidence. These findings show that memory sophistication is a complicated phenomenon, they indicate when memory limitations generate expensive mistakes, and they suggest how to minimize the cost of memory mistakes in the workplace.