Elsevier

Ecological Economics

Volume 154, December 2018, Pages 128-144
Ecological Economics

Analysis
Communicating Resourcefully: A Natural Field Experiment on Environmental Framing and Cognitive Dissonance in Going Paperless

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2018.07.020Get rights and content
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open access

Abstract

In a large-scale natural field experiment comprising 38,654 customers of a renewable energy supplier in the United Kingdom, we randomize environmental information and dissonance-inducing messaging to promote an active switch from paper to online billing. We find that environmental information and imagery is ineffective in inducing behavior change. Interestingly, the dissonance-inducing messaging weakly improves uptake by 1.2 percentage points among our main sample but backfires among a subsample of individuals with doctoral educations, decreasing uptake by 6.2 percentage points relative to a control group. Contrary to the majority of the literature on gender and environmental behavior, females in our sample are less likely to switch to paperless billing.

JEL classification

D12
D83
L21
Q29

Keywords

Natural field experiment
Message framing
Cognitive dissonance
Information provision
Imagery
Resource use
Paperless billing

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