Job market paper

Relative Income and Preferences for Public Goods

with Anca Balietti and Angelika Budjan

Under review

Individual preferences for public goods depend on personal benefits. We show that relative income perceptions affect beliefs about personal benefits and thereby preferences for public goods. In two survey experiments with Indian respondents on the topic of air pollution, we shift relative income perceptions using both a novel method that induces exogenous variation, and a standard information treatment. We then elicit preferences for air quality, including real-stakes contributions to environmental initiatives. When perceived relative income increases, right-wing supporters withdraw contributions. This coincides with reduced health concerns and lower adoption of private protection against pollution. Contributions are unchanged among center-left supporters.

Publications

The Creation of Social Norms under Weak Institutions

with Florian Diekert, Israel Waichman, and Joseph Luomba

Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, 9(6), 2022

Formal regulations often fail to ensure sustainable management of natural resources. An alternative approach could rely on the interaction of norm-based interventions and social sanctions. Our lab-in-the-field experiment with fishermen at Lake Victoria studies how a norm-based intervention, namely, social information about high or low levels of previous cooperation, affects behavior and beliefs in a prisoner’s dilemma game with or without weak social sanctioning. Providing different social information succeeds in creating different norms of cooperation, but only if sanctioning is possible: cooperation rates start at a high level and stay at a high level when social information emphasizes cooperation but start at a low level and stay at a low level when social information emphasizes defection. Without social sanctioning, cooperation rates decline, irrespective of the social information. Particularly participants with close connection to others in their experimental session conform to the behavior that is emphasized by the social information message under sanctioning.

Working Papers

Strategic Ignorance and Perceived Control

with Anca Balietti, Angelika Budjan, and Alice Soldà


When useful information provokes negative emotion, it may deliberately be ignored. We experimentally investigate whether increasing perceived control can mitigate such strategic ignorance. Participants from India were presented with a choice to receive information about the average loss of life expectancy due to air pollution in their home district and were later asked to recall it. We find that an increase in perceived control substantially improves information recall, an effect driven by individuals with optimistic prior beliefs. We conduct the same experiment in the US and confirm this latter result. A theoretical framework rationalizes our findings.

Changing Collective Action: Norm-Nudges and Team Decisions

with Florian Diekert

Revise & resubmit at Games and Economic Behavior


Nudges are widely used and a broad literature documents that they successfully affect individual behavior. However, in most settings where nudges are needed to change collective action, teams – not individuals – determine outcomes. Because team decision making is pervasive, learning whether nudges work with teams in social dilemmas is important, especially when formal enforcement is difficult. Here, we show that a nudge increases team cooperation by 14 to 16 percentage points in a social dilemma among fishing crews at Lake Victoria, Tanzania. The nudge is particularly effective when team decisions are made by a team member with leadership experience. Our findings are a proof of concept that expands the toolkit of empirical researchers and policy makers that address social dilemmas among teams.

Subsidizing Compliance in an Open-Access Resource System

with Florian Diekert, Timo Goeschl, Santiago Gòmez-Cardona, and Joseph Luomba

Illegal, unreported, and unregulated resource use is a major regulatory problem, especially in developing countries. We propose the use of subsidies to induce compliance. By making harvesting more compliant, the policy is designed to protect the resource even when attracting new entry under open-access. In a field experiment in the Lake Victoria fisheries, we develop a novel multiple price list mechanism and determine the subsidy required to induce demand for legal production inputs, compensating resource users for productivity losses net of enforcement risk. A 21% discount is sufficient to induce demand for legal fishing gear in half of our sample. 

Work in Progress