IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/bamber/319884.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Awards vs. labels: Incentivizing investments in environmental quality

Author

Listed:
  • Heidelmeier, Lisa
  • Schmitt, Stefanie Y.

Abstract

Although consumers often care about environmental quality, limited attention impairs consumers' perception of environmental quality. Environmental awards and labels make environmental quality salient and attract consumers' attention. We analyze how awards and labels affect firms' investments in environmental quality and social welfare. We show that, with an award, both firms invest in environmental quality; with a label, only one firm invests. Under awards, investments depend positively on salience. Under labels, investments depend non-monotonically on salience. A welfare-maximizing social planner prefers awards over labels if and only if marginal damage and salience are sufficiently high such that consumers overestimate the environmental quality of the goods.

Suggested Citation

  • Heidelmeier, Lisa & Schmitt, Stefanie Y., 2025. "Awards vs. labels: Incentivizing investments in environmental quality," BERG Working Paper Series 206, Bamberg University, Bamberg Economic Research Group.
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:bamber:319884
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/319884/1/1928948375.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    awards; environmental quality; labels; limited attention; salience;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D91 - Microeconomics - - Micro-Based Behavioral Economics - - - Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making
    • L13 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets
    • L15 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Information and Product Quality
    • Q52 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Pollution Control Adoption and Costs; Distributional Effects; Employment Effects
    • Q58 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Environmental Economics: Government Policy

    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:zbw:bamber:319884. 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: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/bebamde.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.