Abstract
To examine which considerations play a role when individuals make decisions to purchase sustainable product varieties or not, we have conducted a large scale field experiment with more than 600 participating households. Households can vote on whether the budgets they receive should only be spent on purchasing the sustainable product variety, or whether every household in a group is free to spend their budget on any product variety. By conducting several treatments, we tested whether people tend to view sustainable consumption as a social dilemma or as a moral dilemma. We find little support for the hypothesis that social dilemma considerations are the key drivers of sustainable consumption behaviour. Participants seem to be caught in a moral dilemma in which they not only weigh their individual financial costs with the sustainable benefits but they also consider the consequences of restricting other people’s freedom of choice. Complementary survey results further substantiate this claim and show that many people are reluctant to impose restrictions on their peers, but, at the same time, our results also suggest substantial support for the government to regulate the availability of unsustainable product varieties.
Highlights
Problems of sustainability and sustainable development tend to be more wicked: (i) the less consensus there is regarding the urgency of the problem; and, not unrelated, (ii) the larger the distance between beneficiaries of sustainability actions and those who bear the costs of providing them
Our experimental results imply that individual, moral considerations are more leading in sustainable consumption issues than social dilemma considerations
We have explored whether social dilemma considerations play a role in individual decisions regarding sustainability problems—in addition to more personal considerations such as moral concerns
Summary
Problems of sustainability and sustainable development tend to be more wicked: (i) the less consensus there is regarding the (perceived) urgency of the problem; and, not unrelated, (ii) the larger the distance (geographically, or temporally) between beneficiaries of sustainability actions and those who bear the costs of providing them. The larger the number of individuals that can be committed to undertake the sustainable actions, the more likely it is that an individual will vote in favour of such inducements or regulations—because for the same amount of costs incurred by the individual, the impact of collective action will be higher the larger the number of individuals who are contributing too. This holds, for example, for decisions of households to consume the sustainable or conventional variety of a particular product
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