Nudges and behavioral interventions have become a popular tool to stimulate prosocial behavior. Little is known, however, on how to design effective social interventions in contexts in which the descriptive norm is low, i.e. when a desirable behavior is only practiced by a minority within the...

This paper reports the results of an experiment that brings together psychological measures of competence and overconfidence with laboratory economic measures of individual valuations of uncertainty. We examine the valuations of risky and ambiguous lotteries in a financial decision context. The...

The literature on the energy-efficiency gap discusses the status-quo bias as a behavioral anomaly that potentially increases a household’s energy consumption. We empirically investigate the extent to which the status-quo bias is linked to residential electricity consumption through two...

The literature on the energy-efficiency gap discusses the status-quo bias as a behavioral anomaly that potentially increases the energy consumption of a household through at least three channels: (1) by making consumers keep their energy-using durables as long as possible, until wearout forces...

Carbon taxes are a prominent policy instrument for decreasing the consumption of CO2-intensive goods in order to reduce the negative external effects involved in the production or consumption of such goods. A tax leads to higher consumer prices, which typically lowers consumption. However, in...