Lugar: Sala de Reuniones del Departamento de Economía. Edificio Los Madroños, 2ª planta (ECON-2026)

Ponente: Pau Balart Castro (Universitat de les Illes Balears)

Título: Incentives, Pro-Environmental Behavior and Cheating: Field Evidence From Waste Sorting (Authors: Eduard Alonso-Paulí, Pau Balart, Lara Ezquerra and Iñigo Hernandez-Arenaz)

Abstract: We run a randomized field experiment to quantify the effect of temporary probabilistic incentives to promote waste sorting. For implementing incentives, we exploit a technology that tracks bio-waste sorting in real-time. However, the proposed incentive scheme and technology can be easily curved. Our results show that incentives increase participation in waste sorting and do not induce cheating. When the monetary incentives are in place, participation in waste sorting of the incentive group is 11 percentage points higher than participation of the control group. After removing incentives, the effect is maintained for up to 30-40 weeks and is of identical size immediately before and after removing them, indicating that cheating is not present. This finding is confirmed by several strategies to identify cheating based on non-incentivized disposals and patterns of irregular bin usage.  Finally, we observe that the effect of incentives steadily declines before and after discontinued. These results show that incentives work for promoting the desired behavior in a pro-social activity such as waste sorting. They do not crowd out intrinsic motivation and can even complement it. However, temporary incentives cannot be used to induce a permanent behavior change.