TY - JOUR
T1 - Forward-Looking Belief Elicitation Enhances Intergenerational Beneficence
AU - Bosetti, Valentina
AU - Dennig, Francis
AU - Liu, Ning
AU - Tavoni, Massimo
AU - Weber, Elke U.
N1 - Funding Information:
The study protocol of this paper was approved by the Institutional Review Board at Columbia University (protocol number IRB-AAAB1301). The research leading to these results received funding from the European Research Council under the European Community’s Programme “Ideas”—Call identifier: ERC-2013-StG/ERC Grant Agreement No. 336703—project RISICO “RISk and uncertainty in developing and Implementing Climate change pOlicies”, the Global Thinking Foundation, Yale NUS College through grant number R-607-264-235-121, National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant 72103015), the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC Grant Agreement No. 336155—Project COBHAM" The role of consumer behaviour and heterogeneity in the integrated assessment of energy and climate policies", and US National Science Foundation (Grant SES-DRMS 2049796). We thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and queries that considerably improved the paper. We thank Matthew Sisco for his technical support.
Funding Information:
The study protocol of this paper was approved by the Institutional Review Board at Columbia University (protocol number IRB-AAAB1301). The research leading to these results received funding from the European Research Council under the European Community’s Programme “Ideas”—Call identifier: ERC-2013-StG/ERC Grant Agreement No. 336703—project RISICO “RISk and uncertainty in developing and Implementing Climate change pOlicies”, the Global Thinking Foundation, Yale NUS College through grant number R-607-264-235-121, National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant 72103015), the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC Grant Agreement No. 336155—Project COBHAM" The role of consumer behaviour and heterogeneity in the integrated assessment of energy and climate policies", and US National Science Foundation (Grant SES-DRMS 2049796). We thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and queries that considerably improved the paper. We thank Matthew Sisco for his technical support.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.
PY - 2022/4
Y1 - 2022/4
N2 - One of the challenges in managing the Earth’s common pool resources, such as a livable climate or the supply of safe drinking water, is to motivate successive generations to make the costly effort not to deplete them. In the context of sequential contributions, intergenerational reciprocity dynamically amplifies low past efforts by decreasing successors’ rates of contribution. Unfortunately, the behavioral literature provides few interventions to motivate intergenerational beneficence. We identify a simple intervention that motivates decision makers who receive a low endowment. In a large online experiment with 1378 subjects, we show that asking decision makers to forecast future generations’ actions considerably increases their rate of contribution (from 46% to over 60%). By shifting decision makers’ attention from the immediate past to the future, the intervention is most effective in enhancing intergenerational beneficence of subjects who did not receive a contribution from their predecessors, effectively neutralizing negative intergenerational reciprocity effects. We provide suggestive evidence that the attentional channel is the main channel at work.
AB - One of the challenges in managing the Earth’s common pool resources, such as a livable climate or the supply of safe drinking water, is to motivate successive generations to make the costly effort not to deplete them. In the context of sequential contributions, intergenerational reciprocity dynamically amplifies low past efforts by decreasing successors’ rates of contribution. Unfortunately, the behavioral literature provides few interventions to motivate intergenerational beneficence. We identify a simple intervention that motivates decision makers who receive a low endowment. In a large online experiment with 1378 subjects, we show that asking decision makers to forecast future generations’ actions considerably increases their rate of contribution (from 46% to over 60%). By shifting decision makers’ attention from the immediate past to the future, the intervention is most effective in enhancing intergenerational beneficence of subjects who did not receive a contribution from their predecessors, effectively neutralizing negative intergenerational reciprocity effects. We provide suggestive evidence that the attentional channel is the main channel at work.
KW - Behavioral intervention
KW - Intergenerational benevolence
KW - Intergenerational reciprocity
KW - Query theory
KW - Sustainability
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U2 - 10.1007/s10640-022-00648-3
DO - 10.1007/s10640-022-00648-3
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85123471799
SN - 0924-6460
VL - 81
SP - 743
EP - 761
JO - Environmental and Resource Economics
JF - Environmental and Resource Economics
IS - 4
ER -