Open Access Open Access  Restricted Access Subscription or Fee Access

Collective vs Individual Incentive: A Preliminary Analysis on the Case of Environmental Competitive Challenges in Napoli, Italy

Vincenzo Alfano, Armando Vittoria

Abstract



Which incentives are stronger in creating a desirable behaviour through the spreading of a social norm: the ones that work on collective benefits of the individual ones? This is a question which has been differently addressed by the economic literature, and has presented nuanced evidence when faced empirically. The spreading of a social norm is especially important and interesting in the case of waste recycling. Indeed, it is a typical behaviour in which a small personal effort creates a huge collective advantage. At the same time, it is easy to free ride and avoid to recycle, since the cost are spread on a large amount of people. The city of Napoli, Italy has seen two different environmental challenges, a form of policy aimed to spread a social norm of waste recycling, in a short time span. This is an interesting quasi-experimental setting, useful to conduct a preliminary analysis on the effects of collectives versus individual incentives in spreading desirable recycling behaviour. Our preliminary findings suggest that collective incentives have better results in spreading this kind of social norms.

Keywords


Social norms, waste recycling, recycling policy, collective incentives.

Full Text:

PDF


Disclaimer/Regarding indexing issue:

We have provided the online access of all issues and papers to the indexing agencies (as given on journal web site). It’s depend on indexing agencies when, how and what manner they can index or not. Hence, we like to inform that on the basis of earlier indexing, we can’t predict the today or future indexing policy of third party (i.e. indexing agencies) as they have right to discontinue any journal at any time without prior information to the journal. So, please neither sends any question nor expects any answer from us on the behalf of third party i.e. indexing agencies.Hence, we will not issue any certificate or letter for indexing issue. Our role is just to provide the online access to them. So we do properly this and one can visit indexing agencies website to get the authentic information. Also: DOI is paid service which provided by a third party. We never mentioned that we go for this for our any journal. However, journal have no objection if author go directly for this paid DOI service.