It Wasn't Me! Visibility and Free Riding in Waste Disposal

Alessandro Bucciol; Natalia Montinari; Marco Piovesan

doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2018.12.013

It Wasn't Me! Visibility and Free Riding in Waste Disposal

Alessandro Bucciol^*, Natalia Montinari, Marco Piovesan

^*Corresponding author for this work

5 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

We study the effect of visibility of individual action on free riding using field data on household waste sorting. In our sample households pay an annual fee proportional to the number of emptyings of their bin for unsorted waste. We exploit the variation in the bin sharing policy to estimate the production of unsorted waste when bins are shared or not. We find that unsorted waste production is lower when two households share the same bin compared to households not sharing the bin. This result does not hold when more than two households share the same bin, possibly due to lack of visibility of the individual action. We interpret this evidence as suggesting that peer monitoring can promote virtuous behavior when monetary incentives cannot be used to solve social dilemmas.

Original language	English
Journal	Ecological Economics
Volume	157
Pages (from-to)	394-401
Number of pages	8
ISSN	0921-8009
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2018.12.013
Publication status	Published - 1 Mar 2019

Keywords

Anonymity
Free Riding
Visibility
Waste Management
Waste Sorting

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10.1016/j.ecolecon.2018.12.013

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title = "It Wasn't Me! Visibility and Free Riding in Waste Disposal",

abstract = "We study the effect of visibility of individual action on free riding using field data on household waste sorting. In our sample households pay an annual fee proportional to the number of emptyings of their bin for unsorted waste. We exploit the variation in the bin sharing policy to estimate the production of unsorted waste when bins are shared or not. We find that unsorted waste production is lower when two households share the same bin compared to households not sharing the bin. This result does not hold when more than two households share the same bin, possibly due to lack of visibility of the individual action. We interpret this evidence as suggesting that peer monitoring can promote virtuous behavior when monetary incentives cannot be used to solve social dilemmas.",

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T1 - It Wasn't Me! Visibility and Free Riding in Waste Disposal

AU - Bucciol, Alessandro

AU - Montinari, Natalia

AU - Piovesan, Marco

PY - 2019/3/1

Y1 - 2019/3/1

N2 - We study the effect of visibility of individual action on free riding using field data on household waste sorting. In our sample households pay an annual fee proportional to the number of emptyings of their bin for unsorted waste. We exploit the variation in the bin sharing policy to estimate the production of unsorted waste when bins are shared or not. We find that unsorted waste production is lower when two households share the same bin compared to households not sharing the bin. This result does not hold when more than two households share the same bin, possibly due to lack of visibility of the individual action. We interpret this evidence as suggesting that peer monitoring can promote virtuous behavior when monetary incentives cannot be used to solve social dilemmas.

AB - We study the effect of visibility of individual action on free riding using field data on household waste sorting. In our sample households pay an annual fee proportional to the number of emptyings of their bin for unsorted waste. We exploit the variation in the bin sharing policy to estimate the production of unsorted waste when bins are shared or not. We find that unsorted waste production is lower when two households share the same bin compared to households not sharing the bin. This result does not hold when more than two households share the same bin, possibly due to lack of visibility of the individual action. We interpret this evidence as suggesting that peer monitoring can promote virtuous behavior when monetary incentives cannot be used to solve social dilemmas.

KW - Anonymity

KW - Free Riding

KW - Visibility

KW - Waste Management

KW - Waste Sorting

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U2 - 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2018.12.013

DO - 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2018.12.013

M3 - Journal article

AN - SCOPUS:85058631831

SN - 0921-8009

VL - 157

SP - 394

EP - 401

JO - Ecological Economics

JF - Ecological Economics

ER -

It Wasn't Me! Visibility and Free Riding in Waste Disposal

Abstract

Keywords

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