Francesco Salustri (Università di Torino)

The willingness to pay for environmentally responsible products is an emerging, though under-researched contemporary economic feature. We model it as a multiplayer prisoner’s dilemma and we investigate the role of information in consumers’ decisions with two experiments.
First, we simulate with a laboratory experiment the effect of Cash Mobs in an original variant of sequential public good game in which a subset of players (cash mobbers) is given the opportunity to reveal publicly their cooperation decision. We find that the treatment has a positive gross effect, that is, the share of cooperators is significantly higher in treated sessions and this is mainly due to the higher share of cooperators among cash mobbers.
Second, we test with a natural experiment in selected supermarkets the impact of a public campaign, namely the Oxfam `Behind the Brand’ ranking with world food companies scores, on responsible consumption. Our findings show that the Oxfam ranking matters since the treatment has a positive and significant effect on the market share of the companies with the highest scores and a negative and significant effect on the companies placed at the lowest ranks.