The chapter analyses the socio-demographic and behavioural factors affecting Italian consumer attitudes to cell-based meat and insect-flour-based products. We surveyed a representative sample of the Italian adult population and found that the vast majority of respondents were reluctant to consume cell-based meat and insect-based foods. Consumption intentions were more favourable to cell-based meat. In terms of health consequences, environmental benefits, effects on animal welfare and taste, respondents had more positive perceptions of cell-based meat than insect-based foods. Alignment with tradition was perceived to be higher for cell-based meat than for insect-based products. In general, our findings support existing evidence on the role of socio-demographic factors, such as age, gender, education and political attitude, as drivers of acceptance. We also provide new evidence that technological beliefs and trust in science positively affect consumption intentions for cell-based meat, but not for insect-based products. Finally, we provide new insights into the drivers of acceptance of such products for pet food.

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of regional government initiatives in actively engaging citizens in the energy transition by promoting changes in energy behavior. Employing micro-level data from the German SocioEconomic Panel and insights from the regional-scale "Project 100% Erneuerbare-Energie-Regionen", the research adopts a difference-in-differences approach to inspect the impact of residing in these regions on households' energy consumption and their choices regarding renewable energy technologies and energy efficiency enhancements. The findings reveal that the program has not been able to actively involve citizens in the energy transition, showing negative effects on the three outcomes inspected. This research highlights the importance of a comprehensive understanding of local energy programs and the need for policies that foster an inclusive approach to energy transition.

Policy-makers can address climate change by promoting energy sufficiency and energy efficiency. They can do so through not only traditional economic interventions but also behavioural ones, such as nudges and boosts. However, some individuals are not free to decide how to engage in these pro-environmental strategies. The energy poor may be prevented from choosing options enabling them to meet their energy needs while emitting less. In this context, a combination of financial and behavioural interventions might help achieve both climate change and energy poverty goals. This study introduces a modified public bad game to investigate experimentally the situation in which individuals can choose how to obtain energy services while producing negative externalities. We implement a behavioural intervention using a practice-based boost to empower the understanding of action interdependence and test whether it increases pro-environmental choices. Additionally, we model the income scarcity underlying energy poverty and test the effect of a financial intervention, both alone and combined with the practice-based boost, on pro-environmental choices. Although we observe no positive impact of the boost on pro-environmental choices, we find that a financial intervention alone is effective at addressing energy poverty while also promoting pro-environmental choices.

This paper focuses on decentralized energy in Germany and how households’ environmental behavior in terms of energy consumption is shaped in these contexts. It sets out to gain a more precise understanding of whether decentralized energy initiatives are a good tool to promote the adoption of renewable energies and engagement in other sustainable behaviors to mitigate global warming. This study would be one of the first to investigate the effect of living in 100% Renewable Energy Regions, i.e., regions committed to achieving the status of 100% renewable, on households’ behavior using a large-scale dataset, with a quasi-experimental setting. The analysis, indeed, combines micro-level data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) with information on the Landkreis (districts) that took part in a regional energy project aimed at supporting regions to achieve 100% neutrality of energy production: Project 100% Erneuerbare-Energie-Regionen (100ee-Region). The findings show that German households living in these districts have considerably increased their energy consumption through the years with respect to untreated households. Moreover, results report that the adoption of renewable energies mediates the effect of the treatment on energy usage, outlining a concave parabolic relationship between the mediator and the outcome. These findings, based on real-world evidence, provide powerful information that should be considered by policymakers when promoting the decentralization of energy. Moreover, this study fits into the literature on the determinants of pro-environmental behavior, showing that contextual factors are crucial drivers of it.

This paper contributes to the promotion of multidisciplinary research on ethical consumerism by providing experimental evidence on consumer's willingness to reward sellers by paying higher wages to their workers. We analyze repeated interactions occurring between workers, sellers, and consumers within the framework of an experimental market. By successfully performing a task, workers allow sellers to offer a good through a market. Sellers set the price of goods and decide the wages of workers. Consumers enter the market sequentially and decide whether to accept one of the offers or to leave the market. Our data show that, especially in the first periods of the experiment, some sellers opt to pay high wages to their workers. However, this behavior is not rewarded by consumers, whose purchasing choices are almost exclusively driven by self-interest. In our interpretation, the connection between workers and sellers that connotes our experimental design, with workers who allow sellers to enter the market, may induce consumers to believe that eventual sacrifices for paying high wages to workers must be entirely on sellers. Our result suggests that the more salient is made the importance of some stakeholders in allowing the firm's activity, the fewer consumers' may be willing to sacrifice their monetary payoff to improve these stakeholders' condition.

Abstract We present an experiment that sets up a context of production of a common output obtained by using production means that are randomly and unequally distributed. Before the production phase, subjects must choose a distributive principle for the output division, under ignorance of the allocation of the production means. Subsequently, they make a distributive choice fully aware of their luck and performance. The aim of the experiment is to test, first, whether ordinary subjects in an impartial situation are capable of converging on a fair principle of distribution – able of redressing the arbitrariness of the initial production means allocation; and second, whether these same ordinary subjects are capable of actually following that principle in a real distributive choice that excludes coercion, reputation effects and other forms of social pressures. The main finding is that a distributive rule that redresses initial inequalities is both accepted ex-ante and actually applied ex-post by most individuals. Our conclusion is relevant for the issue of realism of normative theories of justice and the possibility of institution design aimed at implementing distributive justice principles and policies.

The purpose of this article is to closely examine one of the potential drivers of tax morale: intrinsic motivations. Although frequently intended as a single concept, tax morale may take the form of an intrinsic motivation to comply, but can also arise through different channels, such as norms, peer effects, and bounded rationality. Often, these channels overlap, making it difficult to distinguish where the effect of one end and that of the other begins. Moreover, the concept of intrinsic motivation itself embodies different behavioral drivers. In two laboratory experiments, we investigate one of the several facets of intrinsic motivations which can be defined as Unconditional Tax Propensity (UTP). In the first experiment, we test the effect of UTP by avoiding other possible confounding factors such as prosociality, interactions with the experimenters, efficiency concerns, inequity aversion, and threats of enforcement mechanisms. The second experiment extends the research by introducing and considering enforcement mechanisms and deterrence. We do find clear evidence of individual tax propensity, which, in our setting, works on top of both a general sense of prosociality and deterrence threats.(c) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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In competitive settings, boundedly rational search for a satisfactory alternative unfolds through two main pathways: innovation and imitation. Over the past decades, a rich body of work in the behavioral strategy tradition has investigated the mechanisms of innovative and imitative search, shedding light on the relative efficacy in improving organizational performance and gaining (or maintaining) a competitive advantage across diversely complex environments. Despite substantial research and groundbreaking contributions, however, we still lack a full procedural understanding of how search efforts unfold through potentially recursive stages, binding together self-directed innovation and socially-informed imitation in an overarching adaptive process of learning from own and others’ experience. In this paper, we seek to extend prior theoretical and empirical work by providing a comprehensive assessment of this process using a three-stage logic. In so doing, we integrate insights from the behavioral model of adaptation in response to own as well as vicarious performance feedback. We test our three-stage model using data from a laboratory search task in which we contrast the availability and accuracy of imitation (Not Available, Perfect, Imperfect) with the level of complexity (Low, Moderate, High). The results indicate that innovation and imitation entail a self-reinforcing dynamic of increasing performance and mutually adjusting aspirations. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we show how the decision to imitate-the-best is negatively moderated by the degree of uncertainty about the outcome of imitation. And second, we observe that, over the long run, marginal improvements in maximum performance have a less-than-proportionate effect on average performance.

This paper investigates how available time influences the staging of search. We inquire into this question using a laboratory experiment centered on a 2x2 design: shorter vs. longer time horizons and simple vs. complex search landscapes. When more time is available, search oscillates between later stopping and less risky experimentation. In contrast, when less time is available, it oscillates between earlier stopping and more risky experimentation, particularly when the level of complexity is higher. We further examine the frequency of search and the rhythm underlying the patterns of change. Search frequency improves the development of standard procedures able to enhance both average and maximum performance when more time is available. An irregular rhythm, characterized by an uneven pattern of changes, negatively moderates the effect of search frequency, especially when less time is available. On the whole, time surfaces as a unique type of resource that prompts decision makers to differently strike a balance in the way they stage exploration and exploitation. These findings contribute improving our understanding of the temporal unfolding nature of problemistic search.

The most evident shortcoming of the international agreements on climate actions is the compliance to their prescriptions. Can John Rawls’s social contract theory help us to solve the problem? We apply the veil of ignorance decision-making setting in a sequential dictator game to study the compliance to climate change agreements and we test the model in a laboratory experiment. The veil of ignorance shows to be very powerful at inducing the subjects to converge on a sustainable intergenerational path. However, the voluntary compliance to the agreement still remains an open issue, because even small incentives to defect can undermine the compliance stability, and therefore break the whole sustainable dynamic.

When decisions are made before roles are assigned, the Dictator Game is strategically equivalent to a linear Public Goods Game. This suggests that, when played between individuals with the same income, the prosocial behavior observed may be attributed at least in part to reciprocal altruism. Dictators transfer money only because they believe Recipients would transfer money as well, if roles were reversed. By contrast, when the game is played between individuals with different background income, the generosity of the rich towards the poor is more easily attributed to pure, non-reciprocal altruism. We test this hypothesis by eliciting conditional preferences for giving in a Dictator Game in two treatments. In the first students are matched with other students, while in the second students are matched with subjects living in a refugee camp in Uganda. We find that our predictions are only partially borne out by the data. Whether giving is directed to a person with similar or lower socioeconomic status, most subjects reveal conditionally altruistic preferences. Unconditional altruism is virtually absent in both treatments. These counter-intuitive results have important implications for the experimental elicitation of social preferences.

Social dilemmas are mixed-motive games. Although the players have a common interest in maintaining cooperation, each may try to obtain a larger payoff by cooperating less than the other. This phenomenon received increased attention after Press and Dyson discovered a class of strategies for the repeated prisoner’s dilemma (extortionate strategies) that secure for themselves a payoff that is never smaller, but can be larger, than the opponent’s payoff. We conducted an experiment to test whether humans adopt extortionate strategies when playing a social dilemma. Our results reveal that human subjects do try to extort a larger payoff from their opponents. However, they are only successful when extortionate strategies are part of a Nash equilibrium. In settings where extortionate strategies do not appear in any Nash equilibrium, attempts at extortion only result in a breakdown of cooperation. Our subjects recognized the different incentives implied by the two settings, and they were ready to “extort” the opponent when allowed to do so. This suggests that deviations from mutually cooperative equilibria, which are usually attributed to players’ impatience, coordination problems, or lack of information, can instead be driven by subjects trying to reach more favorable outcomes.

We provide experimental evidence on the total and the per-capita amount of collected donations at the increase of the number and variety of organizations available for donations. We vary the number of organizations, their type (nonprofit associations and community foundations) and their charitable purposes (to help people with economic difficulties or disabilities). We show that the number, but not the variety, of nonprofit organizations positively affects the total collected donations. Moreover, we find that, when the number of organizations increases, the inelasticity of total donations to the increase in the number of organizations leads to a reduction in the average amount of collected donations.

The Rawlsian social contract presents the veil of ignorance as a thought experiment that should induce agents to behave more fairly within a distributive context. This study uses a laboratory experiment to test the effect of actual reasoning behind the veil, as a moral cue, in a Dictator Game with taking and production. The main hypothesis claims that reflection from an impartial perspective should lead subjects to put themselves in the shoes of who could be the least benefited. Against our expectations, the impact of the moral cue was null and no attempt to rebalance the unjustified differences was observed.

Abstract Lorenzo Sacconi and his coauthors have put forward the hypothesis that impartial agreements on distributive rules may generate a conditional preference for conformity. The observable effect of this preference would be compliance with fair distributive rules chosen behind a veil of ignorance, even in the absence of external coercion. This paper uses a Dictator Game with production and taking option to compare two ways in which the device of the veil of ignorance may be thought to generate a motivation for, and compliance with a fair distributive rule: individually-as a thought experiment that should work as a moral cue- and collectively-as an actual process of agreement among subjects. The main result is that actual agreement proves to be necessary for agents to be led towards a fair distributive principle and to generate a significant amount of compliance in absence of external authority. This conclusion vindicates the role of actual agreements in generating motivational power in correspondence with fair distributive rules.

This work challenges the very notion of bounded rationality as dangerously too near to some "unbounded rationality" used as a benchmark. Should one assume that there is an "unbounded" rationality as a benchmark? Should one start, in order to describe and interpret human behaviour, from a model which assumes that we, human beings, have complete and well-defined knowledge of our preferences, all possible states of the world, all possible actions (our "technologies"), the mappings among them, and then look for possible "bounds" and "biases"? The chapter proposes an answer that is negative. Rather, the question should be: how do human agents and organizations thereof actually behave in complex and changing environments? Answering this question, the chapter suggests, also entails a significant departure from what is now accepted as behavioural economics, often meant as the analysis of more or less significant deviations from the "Olympic rationality". On the contrary, human beings and human organizations behave quite distinctively from the prescriptive model derived from the axioms of rationality.

In this study, we experimentally analyze the effectiveness of payoff-irrelevant peer-to-peer ratings as a cooperation enforcement device in a finitely repeated public goods game setting. We run two treatments that differ in the amount of information on own and others' received rating points provided to the players, whereas, in a third treatment, we analyze peer approval when assigning ratings to others is costly. In particular, we wonder whether, even under anonymity and in the absence of reputational concerns, (a) players rate others' contribution decisions in the expected direction and (b) the peer rating mechanisms under study foster cooperation and welfare. Our findings reveal that, in the two costless rating treatments, peer rating concerns lead to higher contributions and efficiency, compared to our control. Introducing a small fixed cost for assigning rating points results in a very high percentage of subjects deciding not to rate others' behavior, so that cooperation cannot be enforced.

Some recent experimental literature on the taking game (a variation of the dictator game) suggests that human subjects may generally be taking averse, implying that the moral cost of taking exceeds the moral cost of not giving. In our experiment, our subjects could decide to take tangible objects (lottery scratchcards) brought from outside the lab and thus legally owned by other subjects. This legal treatment was compared with a more standard one where subjects earned their scratchcards inside the lab. Evidence is provided of a (weak) taking aversion that is greater when property is established inside the lab via an effort task than when it is pre-existing and legally enforceable outside the lab.