8:45-9:00

Opening remarks
by Vice Rector for Digitalisation and Sustainability Irene Hänschel-Erhart

9:00-10:00

Scientific Session 1

Christian König gen. Kersting
“Attribution to anthropogenic causes helps prevent adverse events”

Adrian Düll
“Choosing Green or Brown? A Comparative Experimental Study of Consumption Choices in Austria”

Matthias Gondan-Rochon
“Proper Units for Pro-Environmental Behavior”

Luisa Lorè
“Image concerns in second-hand consumption: A vignette study”

Robert Steiger
“If you saw a heat wave at the beach, would you wave back? Estimating impacts of climate change on tourism demand in the Mediterranean”

10:00-10:30

Coffee break

10:30-11:30

Scientific Session 2 

Rene Schwaiger
“#ManyDesignsCarbon: Do behavioral interventions increase support for a price of carbon?“

Linh Nguyen
“Analysis of the factors influencing sustainable consumption behaviour of students at University of Economic and Business, Vietnam National University, Hanoi”

Ivo Steimanis
“A Storm Between Two Waves: Recovery Processes, Social Dynamics, and Heterogeneous Effects of Typhoon Haiyan on Social Preferences”

Kerstin Neumann
“Media Coverage of Firms in the Presence of Multiple Signals in the Environmental Context: A Configurational Approach”

Adrià Bronchal
“Unpacking Italian Perspectives and Willingness to Act against Climate Change: A Survey Experiment.”

11:30-12:00

Coffee break

12:00-13:00

Prof. Alessandro Tavoni
“Behavioral and Social Tipping Interventions to Scale Climate Action”

Professor | Economics | Unversità di Bologna

Abstract & Biography

Behavioral and Social Tipping Interventions to Scale Climate Action

The net-zero transition poses unprecedented societal challenges that cannot be tackled with technology and markets alone. It requires complementary behavioral and social change on the demand side. Abandoning entrenched detrimental norms, including those that perpetuate the fossil-fueled lock-in, is notoriously difficult, preventing change and limiting policy efficacy. A nascent literature tackles social tipping interventions—STI, aiming at cost-effective disproportionate change by pushing behaviors past an adoption threshold beyond which further uptake is self-reinforcing. Intervening on target groups can greatly reduce the societal cost of a policy and thus holds promise for precipitating change. This presentation takes stock of the potential of STI to scale climate action by first reviewing the theoretical insights arising from behavioral public policy based on applications of threshold models from sociology and economics; then, it assesses the initial evidence on the effectiveness of STI, in light of the outcomes of laboratory and online experiments that were designed to study coordination on an emergent alternative to the initial status quo. Lastly, I will discuss potential conceptual limitations and fruitful avenues for increasing the robustness of STI assessments beyond theory and small-scale experimentation.

Dr. Alessandro Tavoni | Professor | Economics | Unversità di Bologna