Löfgren, Åsa () (Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University) Martinsson, Peter () (Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University) Hennlock, Magnus () (Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University) Sterner, Thomas () (Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University)
Additional information is available for the following
registered author(s):
Earlier research has shown that using a default option has a decisive effect on individuals’ choices. In many cases, however, the low proportion of subjects who switch from the pre-set default option might partly explained by inexperience with the goods or services offered, and high transaction costs for switching. By conducting a natural field experiment when environmental economists registered on the web to a conference, the default option to offset CO2 emissions was randomly pre-set. Either the participants had to opt-in to offset, opt-out to offset or there was no default option, i.e. an active choice had to be made with no implicit “guidance” from the default. We used experienced subjects and had low transaction costs of switching. Our findings show that the default has no significant effect on the decision to offset.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Göteborg University, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers in Economics with number
391.
Length: 15 pages Date of creation: 23 Oct 2009 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:hhs:gunwpe:0391
Contact details of provider: Postal: Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University Box 640, SE 405 30 GÖTEBORG, Sweden Phone: 031-773 10 00 Web page: http://www.handels.gu.se/econ/ More information through EDIRC
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Jens Anmark).
Did you know? Citation analysis on IDEAS includes online papers that are freely accessible and whose text could be automatically analyzed, currently about 210000 papers.