Disaggregating the motivational microstructure of individual willingness-to-pay for climate change abatement

• Applicant: Professor Timo Goeschl, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Economic Policy, Applied Economics
• Term: from 2009 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 162064814

This project will shed light on the microstructure of willingness-to-pay for climate protection. Given the very ambitious goals in climate policy and the large sums needed to achieve them, the willingness of citizens to bear costs of this scale is a key policy question. However, science is still far from being able to provide a reliable model to predict how people will respond to different policy instruments aimed at harnessing their willingness-to-pay for a public good such as climate change abatement. There is evidence that people have several distinct motives for contributing to climate protection, each giving rise to some positive willingness. However, very little is known about the process of intra-personal aggregation of these distinct WTPs and intra-personal trade-offs when policies target specific motivations. As a result, policies aimed at harnessing this WTP may significantly fall short of its potential.In this project, a set of large-scale natural field experiments will be carried out and the results combined with evidence from laboratory experiments in order to disentangle and quantify the strength of different motives for contributions to climate protection. Due to the innovative experimental design, field experiments can be run not only with very large but also representative samples for the German population at low cost. Moreover, retiring EU Emission Allowances will provide a novel way for facilitating both incentive-compatible and credible contributions in experiments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Guided by prior research, the project focuses on five sets of motives: altruism, a ‘warm glow of giving’, moral suasions, image motivation, and equity concerns.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants