Publications

Peer-to-peer solar and social rewards: evidence from a field experiment

Working paper by Stefano Carattini, Kenneth Gillingham, Xiangyu Meng, Erez Yoeli on 9 Nov 2022

Peer-to-peer solar offers households who cannot have solar panels fixed to their own homes to access solar energy from their neighbours. But because this is an invisible form of pro-environmental behaviour, the rewards in the form of social approval are lower. This working paper finds that the ability to share reports of green behaviour online made people more likely to show interest in the scheme.

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Observing the unobservable: a field experiment on early adopters of a climate-friendly behavior

Working paper by Greer Gosnell, Stefano Carattini, Alessandro Tavoni on 16 Jul 2021

Increasing the uptake of behaviours that are not yet niche is crucial to the sustainable energy transition. The authors of this paper test a novel approach to foster the uptake of renewable energy tariffs among a large sample of households in England and Wales.

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Trust, happiness, and pro-social behavior

Working paper by Stefano Carattini on 4 Sep 2020

Cooperative behavior is essential for societies to thrive and for humanity to address local and global social dilemmas. This paper combines several large-scale surveys with different strategies for identifying trust, to shed new light on the determinants of cooperative behavior, including that needed to advance progress on climate change mitigation.

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Nudging when the descriptive norm is low: Evidence from a carbon offsetting field experiment

Working paper by Stefano Carattini, Julia Blasch on 1 Sep 2020

The authors of this paper devise a new strategy for social interventions designed to increase climate-friendly behaviour, testing the proclivity of attendees at a major European environmental economics conference to offset their carbon emissions from travelling to the conference.

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Communicating resourcefully: A natural field experiment on environmental framing and cognitive dissonance in going paperless

Working paper by Greer Gosnell on 12 Jun 2018

This paper explores the potential for environmental information and dissonance-inducing messaging to encourage resourceful behaviour, following a study of customers of a renewable energy provider in the UK. read more »

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What drives social contagion in the adoption of solar photovoltaic technology?

Working paper by Andrea Baranzini, Stefano Carattini, Martin Péclat on 17 Jul 2017

This research finds that households, businesses and farms are more likely to install solar panels if others in their neighbourhood have already done so, and in particular if existing installations … read more »

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Be who you ought or be who you are? Environmental framing and cognitive dissonance in going paperless

Working paper by Greer Gosnell on 22 May 2017

This paper explores the potential for environmental information and dissonance-inducing messaging to encourage resourceful behaviour, following a study of customers of a renewable energy provider in the UK. It uses … read more »

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Cooperation in the climate commons

Working paper by Stefano Carattini, Simon Levin, Alessandro Tavoni on 18 Jan 2017

This paper surveys the existing empirical evidence on the scope for cooperation in the climate commons and on the effectiveness of possible interventions to spur it. Given the global public … read more »

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