Clean up your own mess: An experimental study of moral responsibility and efficiency

Michael Jakob (), Dorothea Kübler (), Jan Steckel and Roel van Veldhuizen

Discussion Papers, Research Unit: Market Behavior from WZB Berlin Social Science Center

Abstract: Although market-based environmental policy instruments feature prominently in economic theory and are widely employed, they often meet with public resistance. We argue that such resistance may be driven by a feeling of moral responsibility where citizens prefer to tackle environmental problems themselves, rather than delegating the task to others by means of a market mechanism. Using a laboratory experiment that isolates moral responsibility from alternative explanations, we show that moral responsibility induces participants to incur a sizable cost on themselves as well as on other participants. We discuss the implications of this finding for the design and implementation of environmental policies.

Keywords: Laboratory Experiment; Moral Responsibility; Environmental Policy; Market Mechanism; Climate Change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C90 H23 Q53 Q54 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-cbe, nep-ene, nep-env and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/149869/1/879258969.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Clean up your own mess: An experimental study of moral responsibility and efficiency (2017)
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:zbw:wzbmbh:spii2016215

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers, Research Unit: Market Behavior from WZB Berlin Social Science Center Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().