Pro-environmental behavior and preferences: Empirical investigations of participation in and willingness to pay for community recyling programs

Many consumer choices adversely affect the environment. For example, the demand for goods produced with polluting technologies causes reductions in the level of environmental quality that can be enjoyed by all members of society. Yet, evidence from voting behavior, public opinion polls, and empirical research in environmental economics suggests that people in modern societies are increasingly concerned about the environment, and have marked preferences for combating environmental problems and preserving environmental quality. The canonical result in economics is that people will not take responsibility for their environmental impact in the absence of correct market signals due to the free-riding problem. Nevertheless, both causal observations and formal empirical inquiries of people's real-life behavior, reveal that a non-trivial number of people choose costlier, environmental friendly alternatives, in many choice contexts. This dissertation studies pro-environmental behavior and coexisting preferences for environmental quality in the context of people's participation in, and willingness to pay for, community recycling programs. Since recycling programs help conserve scarce resources, abate the amount and impact of landfill waste, and avoid negative externalities from virgin-material extraction and production, promoting recycling is important from an environmental policy perspective. However, community recycling programs are costly to implement and operate and their political feasibility and economic success depend on people's support and participation. The primary contributions of this dissertation are spelled out in the four separate empirical essays of Chapters 3 and 4, whereas overall research motivation and theoretical foundations are given in Chapters 1 and 2, respectively. In particular, Chapter 3 consists of two essays that examine participation in community recycling programs, employing secondary data from a household survey conducted in Norway. The chapter centers on the relative importance of economic incentives versus non-pecuniary motivations of individual decisions. Chapter 4 consists of two essays that study people's willingness to pay for community recycling programs with data from an original survey carried out in Seattle, Washington. The chapter centers on willingness to pay for increasing the community recycling rate and the mixed private-public good nature of these programs. Summaries of the essays and concluding remarks are given in Chapter 5.