Green nudges: Do they work? Are they ethical?

Christian Schubert

MAGKS Papers on Economics from Philipps-Universität Marburg, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, Department of Economics (Volkswirtschaftliche Abteilung)

Abstract: Environmental policies are increasingly informed by behavioral economics insights. ‘Green nudges’ in particular have been suggested as a promising new tool to encourage consumers to act in an environmentally responsible way, such as choosing renewable energy sources or saving energy. While there is an emerging literature on the instrumental effectiveness of behavioral policy tools such as these, their ethical assessment has largely been neglected. This paper attempts to fill this gap by, first, providing a structured overview of the most important contributions to the literature on pro-environmental nudges and, second, offering some critical guidelines that may help the practitioner come to an ethically informed assessment of nudges.

Keywords: Nudges; Libertarian Paternalism; Behavioral Economics; Green Defaults; Autonomy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-ene, nep-env, nep-ger, nep-hme, nep-hpe and nep-res
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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http://www.uni-marburg.de/fb02/makro/forschung/mag ... 09-2016_schubert.pdf First 201609 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Green nudges: Do they work? Are they ethical? (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mar:magkse:201609

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