Social norms, morals and self-interest as determinants of pro-environment behaviour.

This paper considers the role which selfish, moral and social incentives and pressures play in explaining the extent to which stated choices over pro-environment behaviours vary across individuals. The empirical context is choices over household waste contracts and recycling actions in Poland. A theoretical model is used to show how cost-based motives and the desire for a positive self- and social image combine to determine the utility from alternative choices of recycling behaviour. We then describe a discrete choice experiment designed to empirically investigate the effects such drivers have on stated choices. Using a latent class model, we distinguish three types of individual who are described as duty-orientated recyclers, budget recyclers and homo oeconomicus. These groups vary in their preferences for how frequently waste is collected, and the number of categories into which household waste must be recycled. Our results have implications for the design of future policies aimed at improving participation in recycling schemes.

Unionism and Peer-Referencing

This study assesses the 'fair-wage-effort' hypothesis, by examining (a) the relationship between relative wage comparisons and job satisfaction and quitting intensions, and (b) the relative ranking of stated effort inducing-incentives, in a novel dataset of unionised and non-unionised European employees. By distinguishing between downward and upward-looking wage comparisons, it is shown that wage comparisons to similar workers exert an asymmetric impact on the job satisfaction of union workers, a pattern consistent with inequity-aversion and conformism to the reference point. Moreover, union workers evaluate peer observation and good industrial relations more highly than payment and other incentives. In contrast, non-union workers are found to be more status-seeking in their satisfaction responses and less dependent on their peers in their effort choices The results are robust to endogenous union membership, considerations of generic loss aversion and across different tenure profiles. They are supportive of the individual egalitarian bias of collective wage determination and self-enforcing effort norms.

Consumer Behaviour in a Social Context: Implications for Environmental Policy

In this paper we summarise some of our recent work on consumer behaviour, drawing on recent developments in behavioural economics, in which consumers are embedded in a social context, so their behaviour is shaped by their interactions with other consumers. For the purpose of this paper we also allow consumption to cause environmental damage. Analysing the social context of consumption naturally lends itself to the use of game theoretic tools, and indicates that we seek to develop links between economics and sociology rather than economics and psychology, which has been the more predominant field for work in behavioural economics. We shall be concerned with three sets of issues: conspicuous consumption, consumption norms and altruistic behaviour. Our aim is to show that building links between sociological and economic approaches to the study of consumer behaviour can lead to significant and surprising implications for conventional economic policy prescriptions, especially with respect to environmental policy.

Consumption Decisions When People Value Conformity

In this paper we assume that for some commodities individuals may wish to adjust their levels of consumption from their normal Marshallian levels so as to match the consumption levels of a group of other individuals, in order to signal that they conform to the consumption norms of that group. Unlike Veblen’s concept of conspicuous consumption this can mean that some individuals may reduce their consumption of the relevant commodities. We model this as a three-stage game in which individuals first decide whether or not they wish to adhere to a norm, then decide which norm they wish to adhere to, and finally decide their actual consumption. We present a number of examples of the resulting equilibria, and then discuss the potential policy implications of this model.