Moral Suasion and the Private Provision of Public Goods: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic

Björn Bos, Moritz Drupp, Jasper N. Meya and Martin Quaas
Additional contact information
Björn Bos: University of Hamburg
Jasper N. Meya: Leipzig University

Environmental & Resource Economics, 2020, vol. 76, issue 4, No 33, 1117-1138

Abstract: Abstract We study how moral suasion that appeals to two major ethical theories, Consequentialism and Deontology, affects individual intentions to contribute to a public good. We use the COVID-19 pandemic as an exemplary case where there is a large gap between private and social costs and where moral suasion has been widely used as a policy instrument. Based on a survey experiment with a representative sample of around 3500 Germans at the beginning of the pandemic, we study how moral appeals affect contributions with low and high opportunity costs, hand washing and social distancing, to reduce the infection externality as well as the support for governmental regulation. We find that Deontological moral suasion, appealing to individual moral duty, is effective in increasing planned social distancing and hand-washing, while a Consequentialist appeal only increases planned hand-washing. Both appeals increase support for governmental regulation. Exploring heterogeneous treatment effects reveals that younger respondents are more susceptible to Deontological appeals. Our results highlight the potential of moral appeals to induce intended private contributions to a public good or the reduction of externalities, which can help to overcome collective action problems for a range of environmental issues.

Keywords: COVID-19; Coronavirus; Public good contributions; Moral appeal; Moral suasion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D62 D64 H41 I18 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10640-020-00477-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:enreec:v:76:y:2020:i:4:d:10.1007_s10640-020-00477-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... al/journal/10640/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10640-020-00477-2

Access Statistics for this article

Environmental & Resource Economics is currently edited by Ian J. Bateman

More articles in Environmental & Resource Economics from Springer, European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().