Research (poster at the bottom!)
Research (poster at the bottom!)
Reducing meat consumption and promoting organic food are two important levers of the food transition, yet behavioral frictions make it difficult to change individual eating habits. We study whether making a pro-environmental food choice more visible can encourage both vegetarian and organic choices, and whether these effects depend on individual motivations and perceptions of social norms. We combine a preregistered lab-in-the-field experiment in a university canteen, where an organic vegetarian option is served on a distinctive green tray, with incentivized survey measures of perceived social norms, social image motives and other economic drivers of food choice (N=220). We find a positive average treatment effect on vegetarian choices, albeit not robust across all specifications. We also identify robust and substantial heterogeneity, with higher increases in vegetarian choices among students with stronger image-oriented behaviors. Importantly, these effects are concentrated on the meat-versus-vegetarian margin and do not extend to the choice between organic and non-organic dishes. Our findings thus show that the effectiveness of visibility nudges depends on individuals' propensity for image-oriented behavior. They also suggest that a single intervention may shift only one of multiple targeted behaviors, highlighting the importance of designing interventions around the specific behavior policymakers seek to change.
Presentations of this work: Paris Junior Experimentalists Meetings (November 2024), Environmental Economics Seminar, University of Gothenburg (May 2025), CREST-PSAE Workshop (April 2026), PSAE Internal Seminar, Journées LAGV in Aix-en-Provence (June 2026), 16th Annual Conference of the French Association of Experimental Economics (ASFEE) in Lille (June 2026), 13th Annual Conference of the French Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (September 2026)
We explore the interplay between two key drivers of individual green consumption: environmental preferences and social image concerns, when both conspicuous goods and green goods contribute to social image. We consider four lifestyles crossing two characteristics (Green/Brown) x (Conspicuous/Ordinary), all differing in environmental impacts and status benefits. Our working hypothesis is that the more one cares about the environment, the more one weighs green consumption relative to conspicuous consumption in social image benefits, allowing environmentally sensitive agents to achieve moral consistency. Our model generates two general insights under such type of preferences. First, under moral consistency in image benefits, the environmental impact of consumption does not necessarily decrease monotonically when environmental preferences increase. This impact depends on relative impact-intensities, i.e., on pollution per dollar rather than per unit of goods, giving rise to possible volume effects and behavioral rebound. When Green Conspicuous goods have relatively low impact intensity, increasing environmental concern above some threshold may paradoxically raise pollution when image is morally consistent. Second, Green Conspicuous goods smooth the behavioral change from Brown Conspicuous to Green Ordinary lifestyles when environmental preferences change, offering individuals with intermediate environmental concern and strong image motives greener options while maintaining social image from conspicuous consumption. These results show that image-driven green consumption does not automatically reduce environmental damage, and highlight both the potential and the limits of conspicuous green goods in reconciling Eco and Ego in consumer behavior.
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Presentations of this work: FAERE Doctoral Workshop (March 2024), Internal PhD Seminar (June 2024), FAERE Annual Conference (September 2024), 30th EAERE Conference in Bergen (June 2025), 24th Journées LAGV in Marseille (July 2025), 14th Mannheim Conference on Energy and the Environment (May 2026), World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economists (WCERE) in Lisbon (July 2026)
This paper develops a sequential model of pro-environmental (prosocial) behavior with imperfect self-knowledge and self-signaling. Individuals differ in their intrinsic prosocial motivation and choose sequentially between two pro-environmental actions. After choosing an initial action, individuals use their own behavior to update their beliefs about their intrinsic motivation in a morally consistent way, which in turn affects their subsequent choice. Building on the framework of Bénabou and Tirole (2011), we characterize the Perfect Bayesian Equilibria of this self-signaling game and identify how material costs, relative action efficacy, and heterogeneity in intrinsic motivation together shape separation or pooling across types. Our main result is that positive behavioral spillovers between prosocial actions can entail policy spillovers of either sign, as increasing the incentives to adopt an initial prosocial action can non-monotonic responses in subsequent prosocial behavior, even when the behavioral link between the two actions remains positive. We further show that this result is robust to path-dependent costs introducing negative behavioral spillovers. More broadly, the model shows how policies targeting one prosocial behavior can affect subsequent behaviors through the interaction between material incentives and self-signaling.
Presentations of this work: PSAE PhD Seminar, Parisian PhD Seminar in Environmental Economics, Workshop on Cognitive Economics in Herrsching am Ammersee (August 24-25)