Prof. Alessandro Tavoni, Ph.D.

Behavioural Economics and the Environment

This book, written by Alessandro Tavoni together with A. Bucciol and M. Veronesi, provides an overview of environmental topics that may be addressed and, in many instances, better understood by integrating a behavioral approach. Humans have long neglected to fully consider the impact of their behavior on the environment. Most people and institutions lack a clear understanding of the environmental consequences of their actions. The new field of behavioral environmental economics seeks to address this by applying the framework of behavioral economics to environmental issues, thereby rationalizing unexplained puzzles and providing a more realistic account of individual behavior.

While at CESifo Alessandro Tavoni plans to work on and discuss issues related to how targeted interventions can spur sustainable choices and promote cooperation in the climate commons. Furthermore, he will give a seminar and deliver three CES Lectures – Climate Action in Lab, Online and Field Experiments – that will take stock of the recent experimental literature on the provision of environmental public goods. Lecture 1 will give a brief overview of laboratory experiments in economics and adjacent fields that capture environmental externalities at local and global scales. Lecture 2 will focus on field and online survey experiments that assess the role of personal and social norms (descriptive, injunctive and dynamic) and of the behavior’s observability in driving cooperation. Lecture 3 will introduce the concept of social tipping point and give a critical account of the rapidly expanding literature on social norm change and interventions aiming at deliberately triggering tipping to scale up climate action.
Alessandro Tavoni is Professor of Environmental Economics at the Department of Economics of the University of Bologna. Prior to joining Bologna, he was Associate Professor at the London School of Economics, where he led the Changing Behaviour Research Programme at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. Alessandro is the PI of “GREEN TIPPING”, a 5-year ERC Consolidator grant that investigates the effectiveness of “Social Tipping Interventions” to scale up climate cooperation using game theory as well as lab, online and field experiments.