Marianna Khachaturyan

Comparing Female and Male Response to Financial Incentives and Empathy Nudging in an Environmental Context

In the environmental context the combination of financial and non-financial incentives (specifically, empathy nudging) has been shown to be more effective than either of them individually (Czap et al., 2016). We investigate whether there are gender differences in the effectiveness of financial and non-financial incentives by using data from a framed laboratory experiment on environmental conservation behavior. Specifically, we compare the change in conservation efforts of females and males in response to financial incentives and empathy nudging applied separately and simultaneously. Our findings show that financial incentives affects males more than females, while empathy nudging affects only females. The combination of incentive and nudge lead to a synergetic effect for females, but not for males. This implies that policy makers can increase the effectiveness of environmental policy by accounting for these gender differences, especially as the number of farms headed by females in the US increases.