What's in it for me? Self-interest and preferences for distribution of costs and benefits of energy efficiency policies

Abstract

Public acceptability appears an essential condition for the success of low-carbon transition policies. In this paper, we investigate the role of self-interest on citizens' preferences for the distribution of costs and environmental benefits of energy efficiency policies. Using a discrete choice experiment on nationally representative household samples of Sweden, Italy, and the United Kingdom, we first investigate preferences for national burden-sharing rules and for the distribution of environmental benefits accruing primarily in rural and/or urban areas. We examine the role of self-interest and self-serving bias in a correlational manner by looking at the effects of income and location of residency on preferences for these policy attributes. Moreover, we investigate the effect of self-serving bias on preferences for burden-sharing rules in a causal manner by experimentally priming randomly assigned groups of participants to feel either rich or poor. Our results suggest that the accountability rule is the most popular and the equal-amount rule the least popular burden-sharing rule. Further, policies with environmental benefits accruing primarily in rural areas are least preferred. We find some evidence for self-interest, especially through our correlational approach. Finally, across country samples, our results reveal heterogeneity in preferences for policy attributes and in the prevalence of self-interest.