Food waste salience and task knowledge to reduce individual food waste: A field experiment in a restaurant setting

IF 1.6 3区经济学 Q2 ECONOMICS

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics Pub Date : 2025-05-22 DOI:10.1016/j.socec.2025.102375

Alice Pizzo , Manuel Suter , Jan M. Bauer , Lucia A. Reisch

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Food waste related to individual consumption creates high economic, social and environmental costs. This study explores two informational strategies for reducing food waste among restaurant guests. We test a two-stage intervention to achieve a reduction in customer food waste. First, we introduce a food waste-related message emphasizing the salience of food waste as an issue and highlighting the restaurant’s commitment to reducing food waste, inviting guests to join its efforts before they select their meals. The second intervention additionally provides guests with details about the portion size of each meal and encourages reflection on their current hunger levels. We find that salience about the issue of food waste alone leads to a 16 percentage point reduction in the probability of reporting food waste compared to the control group. The second intervention, which provides additional task knowledge to better match individual hunger with ordered portion size, shows no difference from the control. We further explore pathways on how salience reduces the probability of reporting food waste and show that the effective intervention had no negative effects on customer satisfaction.

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食物浪费的重要性和任务知识，以减少个人食物浪费：在餐厅设置的现场实验

与个人消费有关的食物浪费造成了高昂的经济、社会和环境成本。本研究探讨了减少餐厅客人食物浪费的两种信息策略。我们测试了一个两阶段的干预，以实现减少顾客的食物浪费。首先，我们引入了与食物浪费相关的信息，强调了食物浪费作为一个问题的重要性，并强调了餐厅对减少食物浪费的承诺，邀请客人在选择食物之前加入我们的努力。第二个干预还为客人提供了每餐份量的详细信息，并鼓励他们反思自己目前的饥饿程度。我们发现，与对照组相比，仅仅对食物浪费问题的关注就导致报告食物浪费的概率降低了16个百分点。第二次干预提供了额外的任务知识，以更好地将个人饥饿与预定的份量相匹配，结果与对照组没有差异。我们进一步探讨了显著性如何降低报告食物浪费的可能性的途径，并表明有效的干预对客户满意度没有负面影响。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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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.