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It is a common assumption to believe that encouraging pro environmental behavior (PEB) in one domain would lead to increased PEB in other domains (best-case scenario) or just be restricted to the initial targeted domain (worst-case scenario). Evidence from a rapidly growing literature on moral licensing suggests that interventions targeting behavioral change could lead to an even worse scenario, with individuals starting to underperform in one domain, as a compensation for their good performance in other domains. We propose to study the dynamic of PEBs when individuals are exposed to a specific nudge (priming) via an original experiment designed to capture actual behavior. We found that priming could increase PEB, but does not thwart moral licensing. Primed individuals end up doing worse than non-primed individual under a moral licensing condition. A more comprehensive view of the mechanisms underlying behavioral change is essential to support sustainable policies.

BACKGROUND Numerous mobile health apps are marketed globally with specific features including physical activity tracking, motivational feedback and recipe provision. It is important to understand which features individuals prefer and whether these preferences differ between consumer groups. OBJECTIVE First, to identify consumers’ most preferred features and rewards for a mobile app targeting healthy eating and physical activity. Second, to reduce numerous individual mobile health app features to a smaller number of key categories as perceived by consumers. Third, to investigate the impact of differences in consumers’ BMI, and self-efficacy on intention to use and willingness to pay for such an app. Finally, to identify characteristics of different target groups of consumers and their responses towards app features via cluster analysis. METHODS 212 participants from France, Italy, the UK, and Germany were recruited online to answer questions about app features, motivation, self-efficacy, demographic and geographic factors. The app features in question had been generated from a fourteen-day co-creation session by a group of consumers from the UK and the Republic of Ireland. RESULTS ‘Home workout suggestions’, ‘exercise tips’ and ‘progress charts’ were the most preferred app features, while ‘gift vouchers’ and ‘shopping discounts’ were the most preferred rewards. ‘Connections with other communication apps’ was the least preferred feature and ‘charitable giving’ was the least preferred reward. Importantly, consumers’ positive attitude toward the ‘social support and connectedness’ app feature predicted willingness to pay for such an app. Differences in consumers’ health status, motivational factors, basic demographics and socio-economic status (SES) moderated these results and consumers’ intention to use and willingness to pay for such an app. Notably, younger and motivated consumers with more experience and knowledge about health apps indicated more positive attitudes and intention to use and willingness to pay for this type of app. CONCLUSIONS The present study indicates that consumers tend to prefer app features which are activity-based and demonstrate progress. It also suggests a potential role for monetary reward to promote healthy lifestyle behaviours. Moreover, the results highlight the role of consumers’ health status, motivational factors, and SES for predicting app usage. These results provide up-to-date, practical and pragmatic information for the future design and operation of mobile health apps.

Background: Healthy adults are consistently falling below national and international recommendations for physical activity and dietary intake across Europe. Interventions to address behaviour change in these fields typically target clinically at-risk individuals. To inform the development of interventions targeting healthy individuals, this study took a co-creative approach with samples of adults from five European countries to qualitatively and quantitively establish motivators, barriers and sustaining factors for positive physical activity and healthy eating behaviour change. Methods: Stage 1 involved a newly-designed online programme that was used to create an online community who identified challenges, motivators and solutions to sustaining positive health behaviours over two weeks. Stage 2 comprised an online survey, developed from the ideas produced in Stage 1, administered to a larger sample to quantify the relative importance of the motivators and barriers discussed. Results: Results from both stages indicated that enjoyment of health behaviours, positive emotions before and after activities, and installing rewards were key motivators for both behaviours across all five countries. Barriers included difficulties with habit-breaking, giving in to temptation and negative affective states. Participants reported that changes in physical activity and eating behaviour complemented one another. Those with a high BMI placed more importance on social motivators (e.g. social pressure) than those with healthy BMI. Participants’ reports of motivating factors and barriers often reflected relevant approaches from consumer science, behavioural economics, or psychology.Conclusions: Interventions to support adults who are not chronically ill but who would benefit from improved diet and/or increased physical activity should not focus exclusively on health as a motivating factor. Emphasis on enjoyable behaviours, social engagement and the role of reward will likely improve engagement and sustained behaviour change. Our data call for the integration of different fields in the behaviour change literature that would allow a stronger emphasis on motivational and emotional processes.

The projection bias corresponds to the human tendency to project current preferences into the future as if present preferences will remain unchanged, omitting a range of external influences over the current preferences. We design a survey experiment to investigate the projection bias relevance on two environmentally friendly initiatives, namely solar panels and eco-friendly transport. We found that beliefs and behavioral intentions are subject to positive change when individuals are solicited a day when the weather is congruent with the proposed changes. We draw several policy and managerial implications for environmental issues.

International audience; This study seeks to investigate the impact of payment procedures on behaviour in a standard Dictator game. Although the Between-subjects Random Incentivized System (BRIS) is increasingly utilized in experimental economics, its use could be contested from a purely theoretical point of view. In the BRIS, all subjects play the Dictator game, but only a percentage of subjects (e.g., 1 out of 10) are paid. The aim of this article is to test whether the results obtained using this system are consistent with those obtained using a conventional full payment system in which every subject receives payment. An additional, hypothetical treatment is also run. Results show a very similar pattern between the BRIS and the full payment treatment, whereas the hypothetical payment mechanism leads to far fewer egoistic players and far more egalitarians. These findings lend support to the use of BRIS as a valid experimental methodology.

WOS:000428571100004; International audience; This article explores whether previous good deeds may license antisocial behaviour, such as appropriating a social surplus for private benefits, in a developing country context, namely Madagascar. We design a two-step framed experiment, with one control treatment (a neutral task) and three test treatments (tasks enabling subjects to earn moral credits in three different ways), followed by a taking game in which subjects are given the opportunity to take an amount from a fund allocated to their University. On average, we find that participants in the three licencing conditions appropriate more than those in the control group and that further differences emerge according to the way the moral credits have been earned.

Localisation : Centre de documentation P. Bartoli (S WPL 2014-01), UMR LAMETA, Montpellier 2014-01; The explicit assumption underlying Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) is that offering payments that are at least equal to individual’s opportunity cost will establish individuals’ participation. At the same time, that payment should act as a substitution within landowners’ global income, making environmental conservation compatible with economic development goals, and suitable for win-win policy. This partially acts under the more general hypothesis of money fungibility built-in neoclassical economic premise. Meanwhile, behavioural economics demonstrate that individuals track their financial activities using a set of cognitive labels depending to the context in which it was obtained, each of which being associated with a different marginal propensity to consume. Based on a ‘Humans’ vs. ‘Econs’ approach, we test the effect of income’s origin (‘Low effort’ based money vs. ‘High effort’ based money) on spending decisions (Necessity vs. Superior goods) and pro social preferences (Contribution to a public good) within Madagascar rural areas that are potential beneficiaries of PES programs, using a natural field experiment. Our findings support that human’s behavioural responses matter and could, under some circumstances, alter environmental conservation policies.

We examine whether and how word choice can affect individual perceptions about a proposed Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) program when objective outcomes are similar. From a traditional economic perspective, this type of manipulation would be considered unlikely to affect perceptions and behaviour, especially in the presence of pecuniary incentives and repeated decisions among sophisticated agents. From a behaviourally informed perspective, however, psychological and political theories of wording argue that word choice can have a significant impact on economic behaviour. To substantiate this discussion, we conduct a survey experiment that tests the impact of the words ‘payment’ and ‘compensation’ on favorability ratings of a proposed PES program. These preliminary findings suggest that the words used to describe public policies can be influential non-pecuniary interventions.

International audience; Based on data from a field-experiment in rural Uganda, we show that impatient farmers are more risk-averse than patient farmers. We relied on a simplified version of the Convex Time Budget (CTB) method to elicit farmers’ time preferences and on an independent method for eliciting their risk-preferences. We report two important findings. First, we show that our simplified CTB method applied to farmers from Uganda replicates the key findings of Andreoni and Sprenger’s lab experiments that involved student subjects. Second, we establish the existence of a negative correlation between risk tolerance and impatience, based on two independent measures.

The use of economic incentives for biodiversity (mostly Compensation and Reward for Environmental Services including Payment for ES) has been widely supported in the past decades and became the main innovative policy tools for biodiversity conservation worldwide. These policy tools are often based on the insight that rational actors perfectly weigh the costs and benefits of adopting certain behaviors and well-crafted economic incentives and disincentives will lead to socially desirable development scenarios. This rationalist mode of thought has provided interesting insights and results, but it also misestimates the context by which ‘real individuals’ come to decisions, and the multitude of factors influencing development sequences. In this study, our goal is to examine how these policies can take advantage of some unintended behavioral reactions that might in return impact, either positively or negatively, general policy performances. We test the effect of income's origin (‘Low effort’ based money vs. ‘High effort’ based money) on spending decisions (Necessity vs. Superior goods) and subsequent pro social preferences (Future pro-environmental behavior) within Madagascar rural areas, using a natural field experiment. Our results show that money obtained under low effort leads to different consumption patterns than money obtained under high efforts: superior goods are more salient in the case of low effort money. In parallel, money obtained under low effort leads to subsequent higher pro social behavior. Compensation and rewards policies for ecosystem services may mobilize knowledge on behavioral biases to improve their design and foster positive spillovers on their development goals.

Farmers are necessary agents in global efforts to conserve the environment now that croplands and pastures together constitute the largest terrestrial system on Earth – covering some 48% of ice-free land surface. Whereas standard economic models predict that farmers will participate in conservation programs so long as they are profitable, empirical findings from behavioral economics point to a number of normally unobservable preferences that may influence the decision-making process. This study tests, for the first time, whether heterogeneity in behavioral preferences correlates with decisions to participate in Payments for Environmental Services (PES) programs. We elicit individual trust and time preferences using economic experiments and link resulting measures to household survey data and participation decisions in a Ugandan PES program. We find that farmers who exhibit a preference for proximate gains – present-biased preferences – are 47.7% more likely to participate in the program than those who show time-consistent or future-biased preferences. This result has implications for ongoing and planned PES programs involving farmers, particularly in Africa, by highlighting a potential relationship between payment timing and participation, and further validates the use of behavioral experiments in explaining real-world decisions.

Farmers are necessary agents in global efforts to conserve the environment now that croplands and pastures together constitute the largest terrestrial system on Earth – covering some 48% of (ice-free) land surface. Whereas standard economic models predict that farmers will participate in conservation programs so long as they are profitable, empirical findings from behavioral economics point to a number of normally unobservable preferences that may influence the decision-making process. This study tests whether heterogeneity in behavioral preferences correlates with decisions to participate in Payments for Environmental Services (PES) programs. We elicit individual trust and time preferences using incentivized choice experiments and link resulting measures to PES enrollment and household survey data in Uganda. We find that farmers who exhibit present-biased preferences – those who show a particular desire for proximate gains – are 44.1% more likely to self-select into PES than those who show time-consistent or future-biased preferences.

Recent research argues that a good deed can disinhibit individuals and lead them to achieve undesirable deeds (e.g., choosing a salad which leads to increased snack intake). This so-called licensing effect has been recently documented in several analyzes, but we still lack a stabilized analytical framework. We also mention several contributions in behavioral economics that can explain licensing effects by alternative rationales. We aim at defining and characterizing the licensing effect and emphasize plausible circumstances under which it can lead to unexpected adverse effects. We use examples from several domains such as food consumption or prosocial behaviors. Several policy implications are developed. We identify several research extensions to better understand this licensing effect. We also indicate strategies that can be used to overcome this bias. Classification JEL : Q50, D03, D04

We test experimentally a prediction of the ‘moral credit model’, in which committing a virtuous act creates moral credits that can license immoral behaviour in a succeeding decision. We use a basic cheating experiment that was either preceded by a virtuous deed or not in a developing country context. We found that people who previously achieved a good deed cheat more. Gender and origin are also significant explicative variables for cheating.

According to the so-called ‘self-licensing effect’, committing to a virtuous act in a preceding choice may lead to behave less virtuously in the succeeding decision. Consequently, well-intentioned policies can lead to overall counter-productive effects by licensing people to behave badly in related behaviors. On the other side, motivational crowding theory argues that constraining people to adopt a desirable behavior can backfire. We use of a classroom experiment to test whether a regulatory framework to incentivize individuals to adopt pro-environmental behavior generate similar spillovers in terms of licensing effect than a non-regulatory framework. We show that the way the good deed is caused doesn’t seem to influence the licensing effect. Nevertheless, we found that business- and environmental-orientated majors react adversely to the regulatory framework. We show that environmental-orientated students exhibit higher intrinsically motivations than business-orientated ones. Accordingly, we suggest that the licensing effect is more likely to arise when the preceding ‘virtuous’ act is freely chosen (respectively regulatory caused) for non-intrinsically (respectively intrinsically) motivated individuals.