Green goods: are they good or bad news for the environment? Evidence from a laboratory experiment on impure public goods
Alistair Munro and
Marieta Valente
No 37, NIMA Working Papers from Núcleo de Investigação em Microeconomia Aplicada (NIMA), Universidade do Minho
Abstract:
An impure public good is a commodity that combines public and private characteristics in fixed proportions. Green goods such as dolphin-friendly tuna or green electricity programmes provide increasingly popular examples of impure public goods. We design an experiment to test how the presence of impure public goods affects pro-social behaviour. We set parameters, such that from a theoretical point of view the presence of the impure public good is behaviourally irrelevant. In a baseline setting, where the impure public good provides only small contributions to the public good, we observe that on aggregate pro-social behaviour, defined as total contributions to the public good, is lower in the presence of the impure good. Some individuals do not alter their decisions, but roughly two fifths of subjects make a lower contribution to the public good in the presence of the impure public good. On the contrary, in the case where the impure public good favours the public good component at the expense of private earnings, individuals are unaffected in their behaviour. We conclude that the presence of green goods which have only a small environmental component may reduce pro-environmental behaviour.
Keywords: green goods; impure public goods; pro-social behaviour; social norms; experimental economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D64 H41 Q59 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2008-11, Revised 2011-12
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www3.eeg.uminho.pt/publications/NIMAwp37.pdf full text (application/pdf)
none
Related works:
Journal Article: Green Goods: Are They Good or Bad News for the Environment? Evidence from a Laboratory Experiment on Impure Public Goods (2016)
Working Paper: Green goods: are they good or bad news for the environment? Evidence from a laboratory experiment on impure public goods (2009)
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:nim:nimawp:37/2008
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
NIMA, EEG - Universidade do Minho, 4710-057 Braga, Portugal
http://nima.eeg.uminho.pt/
nima@eeg.uminho.pt
The price is free.
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in NIMA Working Papers from Núcleo de Investigação em Microeconomia Aplicada (NIMA), Universidade do Minho NIMA, EEG - Universidade do Minho, 4710-057 Braga, Portugal.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by NIMA (nima@eeg.uminho.pt).