Alexander von Humboldt-Professorship
Human impacts on the world’s ecosystems are undermining the very basis of our societal well-being, and institutions are needed that foster more sustainable human behavior. Two modern policy approaches complementing or substituting for conventional command-and-control approaches have emerged: (i) economic incentives, and (ii) cooperative approaches based on self-regulation. They are based on apparently contradicting assumptions about what drives human behavior, namely (i) self-interest, requiring material motivations, or (ii) social and environmental preferences providing intrinsic motivations for sustainable action, and beliefs supporting such action. However, individuals are more likely to have a mix of these motivations, and promoting one can impact the other. Careful policy design requires understanding the interplay between economic incentives, social and environmental preferences, and relevant beliefs, to assure that combining approaches is not counterproductive.
The general objective of the Alexander von Humboldt (AvH)-professorship research was to analyze how to design effective and efficient policies combining economic incentives and self-regulation, considering that the preferences and beliefs driving human behavior may be policy-dependent. For this purpose, our research set out to analyse the performance of specific policies considering insights from behavioral economics, psychology, and other related disciplines, and by applying economic (lab and field) experiments, complemented with systematic literature reviews, surveys, choice experiments, and statistical and econometric data analyses.
Specific objectives
- To assess which policy design features affect whether economic incentives promote pro-environmental behavior, intrinsic motivations, and beliefs among ecosystem managers in providing environmental services.
- To assess the potential of participatory workshops to enhance (crowd in) cooperation – by themselves and as complements to payments for environmental services (PES) –, and the channels through which this occurs.
- To assess the potential of other (complementary) approaches (e.g., nudges, discourse, monitoring and enforcement, virtual reality) and mechanisms (e.g., social distance, social identity, self-identity) for activating or promoting other-regarding preferences and pro-environmental behavior.
- To analyze how policy design features affect self-selection into a PES program and thereby affect initial preference distribution and cooperation.
- To assess whether economic incentives like PES also affect social norms and may spill over to other behavioral domains or actors.
- To compare experimental outcomes from the laboratory and the field.
The research consisted of 7 PhD projects, 4 literature reviews, and 13 additional field- and lab-experimental studies, was conducted in cooperation with research partners worldwide, and resulted in more than 90 journal articles and book chapters.