Susann Adloff

R e s e a r c h

Wait and See? Public Preferences for the Temporal Effectiveness of Coastal Protection  [Ecological Economics, 2023 | Link]

Under uncertainty about the kind, extent, or time frames of coastal threats, efficient protection requires measures that are effective in the short term and flexible enough to assure protection even if conditions change in the long term. Existing protection options are unable to offer both attributes simultaneously, creating a trade-off between short-term and long-term effectiveness in protection choice. This paper investigates the role played by differences in the temporal effectiveness of coastal protection measures in the choice of protection modes. Results from a discrete-choice experiment implemented in Papua New Guinea suggest that respondents have a strong preference for long-term over short-term effectiveness; an urgency to protect cannot be identified. Using incentivized preference measures for patience and risk-aversion as well as sociodemographic controls, we account for taste heterogeneity and validate the robustness of our results. 

joint work with Katrin Rehdanz

Responsibility Attribution and Community Support of Coastal Adaptation to Climate Change: Evidence from a Choice Experiment in the Maldives  [Journal of Choice Modeling, 2024] [link]

Community support for climate change adaptation projects markedly benefits effective protection. A relevant driver of community support is the perceived attribution of responsibility to individuals. If individuals attribute responsibility for adaptation to others, e.g. public authorities, this reduces the adaptation efforts of the individual, might induce preference uncertainty, and can lead to maladaptation. We study individuals' perceptions of personal responsibility and preferences for coastal protection in a setting in which individuals have little formal responsibility. To do so, we collect data from the Maldives, a small island development state with significant risks of seaborne hazards where responsibility for coastal protection formally rests with the central government without significant involvement of local communities. Using survey measures and a Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE), we investigate respondents' sense of personal responsibility and their preferences for climate change adaptation distinguishing between preferences for hard, man-made structures and soft, working-with-nature protection approaches. The results show that responsibility perception plays an important role for stated willingness to support protective measures. However, they further show a mismatch between formally assigned and perceived responsibility for protection with a majority of respondents having a strong sense of personal responsibility for protection. In addition, the DCE results indicate a misalignment of people's preferences and the measures implemented by the government. While the latter belong to the group of hard protection measures, the majority of respondents show a clear preference for soft protection. We discuss the implications of these findings and highlight the importance of a better understanding of drivers of responsibility perceptions.

joint work with Katrin Rehdanz

Adapting to Climate Change: The Role of Event Type for Protection Motivation   [manuscript]

Climate change largely unfolds by two types of events - extreme events and gradual longterm changes - which differ markedly in occurrence probability and (marginal) impact. This paper shows evidence that these differences in characteristics induce two structurally different cognitive routes underlying people’s protection motivation. Using field data on the willingness to protect against coastal hazards in a sample simultaneously exposed to sea level rise and coastal flooding, variation in cognitive processing of events is identified at the level of event awareness, expectation formation and adaptation motivation. The results call for more nuanced research and bear direct policy relevance. In case of long-term gradual events, the data suggests that a correction of event misperceptions can increase motivations to protect, in case of extreme events, the stimulation of protection motivation requires an increase in future expectation levels.

Social Image in Context: The Role of Social Norms and Social Relationships  [manuscript]

This paper studies the dependence of social image effects on the social context given by social norms and social network relations. Comparing behaviour in a dictator game played in private and in front of an observer, we find that social norms qualify as reference points for the direction of social image effects. That is, people's behaviour converges towards the endogenously measured social norm. This effect is strongly heterogeneous with regard to the relation between subject and observer. The larger the perceived social distance to the observer the stronger is the norm enforcing effect of observation on the subject. In line with this finding, convergence to the norm in public is lower if subject and observer share a link in cooperation networks. In addition, the relation between perceived social distance and observer effect is strongly mediated by an observer's centrality in conversation networks and strongest for observers with low centrality. As social norms are endogenous within groups, the finding that norms serve as reference points for social image effects provides a structural foundation for the heterogeneity of social image effects. Further, the strong role of social distance for image effects, that we find, implies that one should be cautious to transfer the size of social image effects identified in anonymous observer treatments in the lab into a world where one is often times surrounded by close ones. Lastly, hypotheses derived from the literature on cooperation enforcement cannot be validated in this paper, instead it seems that they are overshadowed by the strong impact of social distance and observer centrality on conformity.

joint work with Andreas Pondorfer