Greenwashing your personality

Fabienne Cantner (), Christoph Drobner and Sebastian Goerg
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Fabienne Cantner: Technical University of Munich (TUMCS)
Christoph Drobner: Technical University of Munich (TUMCS)

Munich Papers in Political Economy from Munich School of Politics and Public Policy and the School of Management at the Technical University of Munich

Abstract: Behaving more sustainable has been shown to signal cooperativeness in social dilemmas. We investigate whether people exploit this apparent signaling value by in ating their intention to behave sustainably without changing their actual behavior. We explore this question in an online experiment in which participants self-report the importance of sustainability in their daily lives before engaging in a prisoner's dilemma game. Using a between-subjects design, we manipulate whether participants have the opportunity to adjust their self-reported sustainability scores after receiving instructions for the game. The results show that almost 30% of participants increase their sustainability scores in anticipation of higher transfers from their matched partners. However, this greenwashing strategy proves to be unsuccessful, as higher sustainability scores do not lead to higher transfers.

Keywords: Greenwashing; Social Dilemma; Signaling; Sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 H41 Q50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2023-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-env, nep-exp and nep-gth
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aiw:wpaper:29

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