We examine the distributional impact of domestic carbon pricing in three Sub-Saharan African countries. We combine household expenditure surveys and sectoral carbon intensity data derived from a multi-regional input-output model for Ghana, Nigeria and Uganda. Our findings indicate that domestic carbon pricing is progressive in all three countries. This primarily results from higher budget allocations for direct energy consumption in wealthier households, especially concerning motor vehicles and electrical appliances. Disparities in welfare losses within income groups are primarily due to varying energy consumption patterns. Importantly, we identify low-income households as being disproportionately affected by carbon taxes. Lump-sum transfers could fully compensate most households in the bottom two income quintiles, significantly reducing poverty. Our comparative analysis emphasizes the importance of country-specific differences in energy expenditures and carbon intensities in shaping the distributional outcomes of carbon taxes.

Novel plant-based meat alternatives (PBMAs) have the potential to disrupt traditional meat industries, but only if consumers substitute PBMAs for meat over time. This study uses weekly household scanner data from 2018 to 2020, to estimate demand for PBMAs in the ground meat market. We use a basket-based demand approach by estimating a multivariate logit model (MVL) to determine cross-product relationships between PBMAs, ground turkey, ground chicken, and ground beef, while simultaneously exploring the role of prior consumption habits and demographics on demand. The only demographic characteristic affecting PBMA demand is the household education level of having a college degree when controlling for other factors. We found no significant seasonal difference in purchasing patterns, after controlling for cross-product effects, prior purchases, and demographics. Demand for PBMAs is driven by habit formation rather than variety seeking, as higher past purchases of PBMAs lead to a higher likelihood of current PBMA purchases. Consumers with higher past ground beef purchases are less likely to choose PBMAs, suggesting growth of this new product is coming from consumers on the margin rather than from heavy beef buyers substituting away from their traditional purchases. PBMAs and ground beef are utility complements with all meat products, suggesting that traditional meat and PBMA companies, along with retailers, should explore synergies in product marketing and offerings.

College students gain a considerable amount of weight by consuming unhealthy food. Many universities adopt costly programs to alleviate this problem. We study the effect of a simple, inexpensive option: moving unhealthy items out of sight. The opportunity to investigate this intervention comes from the decision of a dining hall in the University of New Hampshire that relocated cookies from a main section in plain sight to an out-of-the way corner. The cost of cookies did not change, since the dining hall operates as an “all that you can eat” restaurant. Relative to pizza, a product that did not change location, the consumption of cookies dropped by up to 22% relative to their predicted level had the relocation not taken place. We see this as evidence that simple changes in design can nudge students towards healthy eating.

China was one of the world's most important areas of growth in wine demand in the 2010s, accounting for 7% of the world's wine consumption and 8% of its value of wine imports by 2017. But China's per capita wine consumption peaked in the mid-2010s, and its wine imports have more than halved since then. As well, the sources of China's imports of wine have fluctuated considerably over the past two decades, making this a risky market for wine exporters. Certainly, the COVID-19 disruption played a role, but between 2019 and 2022, the fall in sales was considerably larger for wine (47%) than for spirits (17%) and beer (9%), such that wine's share of alcohol consumption in China fell by two-fifths over those 3 years alone. The article examines the reasons behind the dramatic gyrations in this globally important market and their impact on wine-exporting countries, and speculates on future trends.

We compared three common unit value imputation methods using household purchase data from 2018 to 2020 concerning five milk categories. Regression-based imputation outperformed household mean and retailer mean imputations, based on root mean squared error, mean absolute error, and mean absolute percent error. In a censored QUAIDS model, retailer mean imputation yielded statistically different estimates from the other two methods concerning compensated own-price and cross-price elasticities. We demonstrated that different price imputation methods used in household demand estimation generate different results in predicted prices and estimated price elasticities, and these differences may not necessarily be trivial.

We performed a field experiment in Uruguay in which a 20-year-old chooses between a socially visible and a non-socially visible good after a friend randomly received one of these goods or an unknown one. We find no differences in choices when the friend received the nonvisible good instead of the unknown one. However, decision-makers significantly changed their allocation when their friend received the visible good. Consistent with status concerns driving the results, those in a disadvantaged position consumed more and those in an advantaged position consumed less of the visible good. These findings constitute the first experimental evidence of Duesenberry’s demonstration effects and show that status consumption is a relevant phenomenon among the youth in a developing country setting.

Narrow bracketers who are myopic in specific decisions would fail to consider preexisting risks in investment and neglect hedging opportunities. Growing evidence has demonstrated the relevance of narrow bracketing. We take a step further in empirical investigation and study individual heterogeneity in narrow bracketing. Specifically, we use a lab experiment in investment and hedging that elicits subjects’ preferences on rich occasions to uncover the individual degree of narrow bracketing without imposing distributional assumptions. Combining prospect theory and narrow bracketing can explain our findings: Subjects who invest more also insure more, and subjects insure significantly less in the loss domain than in the gain domain. More importantly, we show that the distribution of the individual degree of narrow bracketing is skewed at two extremes, yet with a substantial share of people in the middle who partially suffer from narrow bracketing. Neglecting this aspect, we would overestimate the severity of narrow bracketing and misinterpret its relation with individual characteristics.

Increasing electricity access remains a challenge, particularly in rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa. This study examines the case of Tanzania, where connection rates remain low even among rural households residing ‘under the grid’, and this despite substantial government subsidies for household connections. Using data from 1,774 rural households living within reach of the electricity grid, we investigate correlates of the low grid electricity uptake. We find that proxies for wealth are positively associated with connection status, while social network variables are less so. Capacity to pay thus appears to remain a major barrier, and in-house wiring costs emerge as a significant expense unaddressed by the existing subsidy scheme, exceeding grid connection costs sevenfold. Similar mechanisms influence the choice between grid electricity and traditional or solar energy sources. These findings inform the ongoing policy debate on subsidy design and the role of alternative energy sources in expanding access.

Public acceptability is crucial for the effectiveness of policy implementation. The carbon trading market is widely adopted by many countries and regions to achieve carbon neutrality and mitigate climate change. Our paper utilizes China's carbon trading market as a quasi-natural experiment, drawing on microdata from the China Residential Energy Consumption Survey to analyze the policy's impact on public acceptance of carbon pricing. We find that the carbon trading market significantly reduces the acceptability of carbon prices among households working in carbon-related industries in the pilot areas. This conclusion is still valid after a series of robustness checks. Regarding the mechanism of influence, the carbon trading market raises households' perceived costs, mainly reflected in the negative impact of rising product prices and increasing living costs. Finally, enhancing public perception of carbon, improving the distribution effect and decreasing the information asymmetry of the policy implementation can improve public acceptability of carbon prices.

Experiments involving games have two dimensions of difficulty for subjects in the laboratory. One is understanding the rules and structure of the game and the other is forming beliefs about the behavior of other players. Typically, these two dimensions cannot be disentangled as belief formation crucially depends on the understanding of the game. We present the one-player guessing game, a variation of the two-player guessing game (Grosskopf and Nagel 2008), which turns an otherwise strategic game into an individual decision-making task. The results show that a majority of subjects fail to understand the structure of the game. Moreover, subjects with a better understanding of the structure of the game form more accurate beliefs of other player’s choices, and also better-respond to these beliefs.

Buying lottery tickets is not a rational investment from a financial point of view. Yet, the majority of people participate at least once a year in a lottery. We conducted a field experiment to increase understanding of lottery participation. Using representative data for the Netherlands, we find that lottery participation increased the happiness of participants before the draw. Winning a small prize had no effect on happiness. Our results indicate that people may not only care about the outcomes of the lottery, but also enjoy the game. Accordingly, we conclude that lottery participation has a utility value in itself and part of the utility of a lottery ticket is consumed before the draw.

Intertemporal choices are affected by both discount rate and utility curvature. We investigate how the two aspects of time preference are affected by the size of the total budget using an intertemporal allocation task. At the aggregate level as well as at the individual level, we find magnitude effects both on the discount rate and on intertemporal substitutability (i.e., utility curvature). Individuals are more patient when dealing with larger budgets and also regard larger budgets to be more fungible. The latter effect suggests that the degree of asset integration is increasing in the stake.

In an artefactual field experiment, we implemented a crowdfunding campaign for an institute’s summer party and compared donation and contribution framings. We found that the use of the word ‘donation’ generated higher revenue than the use of ‘contribution.’ While the individuals receiving the donation framing gave substantially larger amounts, those receiving the contribution framing responded more strongly to reward thresholds and suggestions. An additional survey experiment on MTurk indicated that the term ‘donation’ triggers more positive emotional responses and that emotions are highly correlated with giving. It appears that making a donation is perceived as a more voluntary act and is thus more successful at generating warm glow than making a contribution. We surmise that this extends to other funding mechanisms.

An influential result in the literature on charitable giving is that matching subsidies dominate rebate subsidies in raising funds. We investigate whether this result extends to “unit donation” schemes, a popular alternative form of soliciting donations. There, the donors’ choices are over the number of units of a charitable good to fund at a given unit price, rather than the amount of money to give. Comparing matches and rebates as well as simple discounts on the unit price, we find no evidence of dominance in our online experiment: the three subsidy types are equally effective overall. At a more disaggregated level, rebates lead to a higher likelihood of giving, while matching and discount subsidies lead to larger donations by donors. This suggests that charities using a unit donation scheme enjoy additional degrees of freedom in choosing a subsidy type. Rebates merit additional consideration if the primary goal is to attract donors.

This paper examines the effects of competition in experimental posted-offer markets where sellers can confuse buyers. I report two studies. In one, the sellers offering heterogeneous goods can obfuscate buyers by means of spurious product differentiation. In the other study, sellers offer identical goods and make their prices unnecessarily complex by having multi-part tariffs. I vary the level of competition by having treatments with two and three- sellers in both studies, and having an additional treatment with five-sellers in one study. The results show that average complexity created by a seller is not different for the treatments with two, three and five sellers. In addition, market prices are highest and buyer surplus is lowest when there are two sellers in a market.

We study the impact of endowments and expectations on reference point formation and measure the value of food safety certification in the context of fish trading on real markets in Nigeria. In our field experiment, consumers can trade a known food item for a novel food item that is superior in terms of food safety––or vice versa. Endowments matter for reference point formation, but we also document a reverse endowment effect for a subsample of respondents. The effect of expectations about future ownership is weak and mixed. While expectations seem to affect bidding behavior for subjects “trading up” to obtain the certified food product (a marginally significant effect), it does not affect bids for subjects “trading down” to give up this novel food item. Finally, willingness to pay for safety certified food is large for our respondents—our estimate of the premium is bounded between 37 and 53% of the price of conventional, uncertified food.

We provide a simplified test to determine if choice data from a two-commodity consumption set satisfies the Generalized Axiom of Revealed Preference (GARP), and thus the preference or utility maximization hypothesis. We construct an algorithm for this test and illustrate its application on experimental choice data.

This paper reports the results of an experiment in which subjects had to buy real products in 5 different budget/price situations. Subjects were randomly drawn from the population of a medium-sized French city, and some of their socio-economic characteristics were recorded. We check the consistency of product choices with the Generalized Axiom of Revealed Preferences (GARP), and find that 29% of the subjects are GARP-inconsistent. This inconsistency rate is slightly lower than the ones found in comparable studies. A possible explanation for our lower rate of GARP violations might be that the subjects in our study were confronted with less budget/price situations. In looking for determinants of the GARP violations, we find that gender, the size of the household, the degree of switching between different products, and the times spent on performing experimental tasks have significant impacts on the probability of GARP-inconsistency.

Afriat’s (Int Econ Rev 14(2): 460–472, 1973) critical cost efficiency index is often used to measure the extent to which experimental choice data violate the axioms of revealed preference. Under certain conditions, the index yields a value of one—which typically signifies rational choice—when, in fact, the choice violates the axioms. We term this a cost efficient violation (CEV) of the axioms, clarify the conditions under which it arises, and find that CEVs comprise the majority of violations in three of four studies reviewed. We suggest changes in experiment design to eliminate or reduce the likelihood of CEVs.

It is shown that for two dimensional commodity spaces any homothetic utility function that rationalizes each pair of observations in a set of consumption data also rationalizes the entire set. The result is used to provide a simplified nonparametric test for homotheticity of demand and a measure for homothetic efficiency. The article thus provides a useful tool to screen data for severe violations of homotheticity before estimating parameters of homothetic utility functions. The new test and measure are applied to previously published data.