Behavioral rebound effect and moral compensation: An online experiment

IF 1.6 3区经济学 Q2 ECONOMICS

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics Pub Date : 2025-02-01 DOI:10.1016/j.socec.2025.102347

Simon Mathex, Lisette Hafkamp Ibanez, Raphaële Préget

引用次数: 0

Abstract

This paper investigates the behavioral rebound effect as defined by Dorner (2019) in an analytical framework where individuals have environmental preferences. We also study the impact of moral compensation (moral licensing and moral cleansing) on pro-environmental behavior. We propose a theoretical model that integrates behavioral and emotional factors and we conduct an online experiment with 1622 subjects to test our hypotheses. Our findings indicate that a decrease in the marginal damage of a polluting good leads to a decrease in individual’s pro-environmental behavior. This result confirms the existence of the behavioral rebound effect. Additionally, our results show that the moral cleansing effect positively influences pro-environmental behavior, especially among individuals with the strongest environmental attitudes.

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来源期刊

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics ECONOMICS-

CiteScore

2.60

自引率

12.50%

发文量

113

审稿时长

83 days

期刊介绍： The Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly the Journal of Socio-Economics) welcomes submissions that deal with various economic topics but also involve issues that are related to other social sciences, especially psychology, or use experimental methods of inquiry. Thus, contributions in behavioral economics, experimental economics, economic psychology, and judgment and decision making are especially welcome. The journal is open to different research methodologies, as long as they are relevant to the topic and employed rigorously. Possible methodologies include, for example, experiments, surveys, empirical work, theoretical models, meta-analyses, case studies, and simulation-based analyses. Literature reviews that integrate findings from many studies are also welcome, but they should synthesize the literature in a useful manner and provide substantial contribution beyond what the reader could get by simply reading the abstracts of the cited papers. In empirical work, it is important that the results are not only statistically significant but also economically significant. A high contribution-to-length ratio is expected from published articles and therefore papers should not be unnecessarily long, and short articles are welcome. Articles should be written in a manner that is intelligible to our generalist readership. Book reviews are generally solicited but occasionally unsolicited reviews will also be published. Contact the Book Review Editor for related inquiries.