IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/34652.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Self- and Social Signaling: Evidence from Solar Adoption in California

Author

Listed:
  • Bryan K. Bollinger
  • Kenneth Gillingham
  • A. Justin Kirkpatrick

Abstract

Prosocial behavior plays a role in many economic contexts, and it has been explained by altruism, social pressure, signaling, and expectations of fairness and reciprocity. We examine prosocial behavior in a context that allows us to distinguish the role of self-signaling and social signaling from alternative explanations, including warm glow. Our context is residential solar, and self-signaling is separately identified from social signaling by the exogenous visibility of potential solar arrays. We show that the political affiliation of proximate peers influences the extent of self-signaling and is crowded out by the private benefits of installing solar.

Suggested Citation

  • Bryan K. Bollinger & Kenneth Gillingham & A. Justin Kirkpatrick, 2026. "Self- and Social Signaling: Evidence from Solar Adoption in California," NBER Working Papers 34652, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34652
    Note: EEE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w34652.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D64 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Altruism; Philanthropy; Intergenerational Transfers
    • H41 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Public Goods
    • Q40 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Energy - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34652. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.