Environmental Incentives: Nudge or Tax?

Benjamin Ouvrard and Sandrine Spaeter ()
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Sandrine Spaeter: ETA, CNRS and University of Strasbourg

No 2016.15, Working Papers from FAERE - French Association of Environmental and Resource Economists

Abstract: We consider a model where individuals can voluntarily contribute to improve the quality of the environment. They differ with regard to their confidence in the announcement made by the regulator about the risk of pollution, modelized in a RDEU model, and to their environmental sensitivity. We compare the efficiency of a tax in increasing individual contributions with the advantages of a nudge based on the announcement of the social optimum to each individual. Under some conditions, a nudge performs better than a tax, in particular, because the individual reaction depends directly on sensitivity, while only indirectly with a tax. Moreover, a nudge does not require information about private contributions, contrary to a tax based on the contributions that are not provided compared to the social optimum. Lastly, its implementation is much cheaper. Yet, some drawbacks are discussed and simulations illustrate our results.

Keywords: incentives; nudge; environmental sensitivity; probability distortion; tax (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D8 Q50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2016-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-ene and nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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http://faere.fr/pub/WorkingPapers/Ouvrard_Spaeter_FAERE_WP2016.15.pdf First version, 2016 (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fae:wpaper:2016.15

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