Moral Suasion and the Private Provision of Public Goods: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic
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Moral Suasion and the Private Provision of Public Goods: Evidence from the COVID‑19 Pandemic Björn Bos1 · Moritz A. Drupp1,2 · Jasper N. Meya3,4 · Martin F. Quaas3,4 Accepted: 11 July 2020 / Published online: 17 August 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract We study how moral suasion that appeals to two major ethical theories, Consequentialism and Deontology, affects individual intentions to contribute to a public good. We use the COVID-19 pandemic as an exemplary case where there is a large gap between private and social costs and where moral suasion has been widely used as a policy instrument. Based on a survey experiment with a representative sample of around 3500 Germans at the beginning of the pandemic, we study how moral appeals affect contributions with low and high opportunity costs, hand washing and social distancing, to reduce the infection externality as well as the support for governmental regulation. We find that Deontological moral suasion, appealing to individual moral duty, is effective in increasing planned social distancing and hand-washing, while a Consequentialist appeal only increases planned hand-washing. Both appeals increase support for governmental regulation. Exploring heterogeneous treatment effects reveals that younger respondents are more susceptible to Deontological appeals. Our results highlight the potential of moral appeals to induce intended private contributions to a public good or the reduction of externalities, which can help to overcome collective action problems for a range of environmental issues. Keywords COVID-19 · Coronavirus · Public good contributions · Moral appeal · Moral suasion JEL Classification C93 · D62 · D64 · H41 · I18 · Q58
* Moritz A. Drupp Moritz.Drupp@uni‑hamburg.de 1
Department of Economics, University of Hamburg, Von‑Melle‑Park 5, 20146 Hamburg, Germany
2
CESifo, Poschingerstr. 5, 81679 Munich, Germany
3
Department of Economics, Leipzig University, Grimmaische Str. 12, 04109 Leipzig, Germany
4
German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Deutscher Platz 5e, 04103 Leipzig, Germany
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I firmly believe that we will succeed in this task if all citizens truly see it as THEIR, as YOUR task. [...] The action of each individual counts. We are not doomed to passively accept the spread of the virus. We have a remedy: we have to keep a distance from each other out of respect for one another. (Chancellor Angela Merkel, March 18, 2020)
1 Introduction Moral suasion is a prominent instrument for aligning individual and public interests (Romans 1966), and one that is increasingly entering the field of environmental economics (e.g. Carlsson et al. 2019; Ito et al. 2018). As a non-pecuniary instrument, moral appeals are outside standard economic cost-benefit analysis. Their monetary costs are typically small, they are fast to implement, and they can complement economic incentives or command-and-control regulations. By affecting social norms or the adherence to norms (Nyborg et al. 2016;
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