Acceptability and Feasibility of Environmental Policies

The visit by Stephan Kroll to CICERO in the summer of 2012 will serve up to four purposes: 1) In the spring 2011, Dr. Kroll conducted experiments at Colorado State University. Tthey will be followed by additional sessions in the fall of 2011. These exper iments are part of a larger research agenda on the acceptability and feasibility of environmental policies such as the environmental tax. The unique twist of this particular set of experiments is that we examine if people with a certain worldview are more or less likely to vote in a certain way. The final analysis and write-up and submission of a paper will be done in Oslo in the summer of 2012 2) The same team will also conduct a new set of experiments. The basic idea is that in a public good experiment , the prime tool for experimental researchers of social dilemma situations, one often observes relative high contribution rates (40-60%). However, in the market experiments with externalities, which are fundamentally very similar, we noticed that subjects very rarely contribute by cutting down on their purchases. We have set up an experimental design, which makes the equivalency between the public good scenario and the market with externalities even more similar, and will write up the paper in summer 2012 . 3) The team is part of a RENERGI proposal. The proposal contains an experiment on potential spillover effects of pro-environmental behaviors. If this project is funded, we will use Dr. Kroll?s visit at CICERO to finalize the specific design of this exp eriment, for which a paper in a peer-reviewed journal can be expected. 4) Currently Dr. Kroll and his collaborators have two papers under submission; one at the European Economic Review (since April 2011) and one at Ecological Economics (since August 201 1). If past experience is a guide, then we optimistically expect to be working on at least one revise-and-resubmit for these papers over the summer of 2012.