Green nudges: Do they work? Are they ethical?
By Christian Schubert. 2016
377 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Environmental policies are increasingly informed by behavioral economics insights. ‘Green nudges’ in particular have been suggested as a promising new tool to encourage consumers to act in an environmentally benign way, such as choosing renewable energy sources or saving energy. While there is an emerging literature on the instrumental effectiveness of behavioral policy tools such as these, their ethical assessment has largely been neglected. This paper attempts to fill this gap by, first, providing a structured overview of the most important contributions to the literature on pro-environmental nudges and, second, offering some critical considerations that may help the practitioner come to an ethically informed assessment of nudges.
Subfields: Building and Construction, Economics and Econometrics, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/05160144051527e889146e0a7aa8d11beedd392e
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Citations in the corpus
- Social Innovation and the Energy Transition (2018, background): “Social innovation can also be aimed at individual behavior, for instance in the form of green ‘nudges’: subtle modifications in people’s decision context in order to gently move them towards sustainable choices without changing monetary incentives or an option set itself [22].”
- Behavioral change for the circular economy: A review with focus on electronic waste management in the EU (2020, background): “This is an example of ‘framing’, a nudging strategy, with undesired outcome (Schubert, 2017), which may”
- Designing an effective climate-policy mix: accounting for instrument synergy (2021, background): “But information provision can complement other types of instruments, sometimes creating positive synergy with these, though it should be said that effectiveness varies strongly between different types of information provision and nudges (Abrahamse and Steg, 2013; Schubert, 2017).”
- A Review of Nudges: Definitions, Justifications, Effectiveness (2020, neutral): “…for retirement, see Benartzi et al. (2017), Glazebrook et al. (2017), andCronqvist et al. (2018); for nudges promoting pro-environment conduct, see Schubert (2017), Wynes et al. (2018), Behavioural Insights Team (2020), Buckley (2020), and Daminato et al. (2021); for nudges increasing tax…”
- Social norms and pro-environmental behavior: A review of the evidence (2017, background): “Finally, we note that a consideration of the ethicality of social norm interventions should obviously precede considerations surrounding the design and implementation of these interventions (see Schubert, 2017 for an approach to determining the ethical quality of green nudges).”