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It Wasn't Me! Visibility and Free Riding in Waste Disposal

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  • Bucciol, Alessandro
  • Montinari, Natalia
  • Piovesan, Marco

Abstract

We study the effect of visibility of individual action on free riding using field data on household waste sorting. In our sample households pay an annual fee proportional to the number of emptyings of their bin for unsorted waste. We exploit the variation in the bin sharing policy to estimate the production of unsorted waste when bins are shared or not. We find that unsorted waste production is lower when two households share the same bin compared to households not sharing the bin. This result does not hold when more than two households share the same bin, possibly due to lack of visibility of the individual action. We interpret this evidence as suggesting that peer monitoring can promote virtuous behavior when monetary incentives cannot be used to solve social dilemmas.

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  • Bucciol, Alessandro & Montinari, Natalia & Piovesan, Marco, 2019. "It Wasn't Me! Visibility and Free Riding in Waste Disposal," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 157(C), pages 394-401.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:157:y:2019:i:c:p:394-401
    DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2018.12.013
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    Cited by:

    1. Boto-García, David & Bucciol, Alessandro, 2020. "Climate change: Personal responsibility and energy saving," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 169(C).
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    3. Hongyu Long & Hongyong Liu & Xingwei Li & Longjun Chen, 2020. "An Evolutionary Game Theory Study for Construction and Demolition Waste Recycling Considering Green Development Performance under the Chinese Government’s Reward–Penalty Mechanism," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 17(17), pages 1-21, August.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Anonymity; Free Riding; Visibility; Waste Management; Waste Sorting;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D01 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Microeconomic Behavior: Underlying Principles
    • D78 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Positive Analysis of Policy Formulation and Implementation
    • Q53 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Air Pollution; Water Pollution; Noise; Hazardous Waste; Solid Waste; Recycling

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